Memories Of My Future

Life courses, both professional and personal, are often directed by unplanned experiences. At crossroads, which path is followed and which hard choices are made can change the direction of one's future. Wendell Bell's life illustrates how totally unforeseen events can shape individual lives. As he notes, despite our hopes and our plans for the future, there is also serendipity, feedback, twists and turns, chance and circumstance, all of which shape our futures with sometimes surprising results. In Bell's case, such twists and turns of chance and circumstance led to his role in developing the new field of futures studies. In Memories of the Future, Bell recognizes the importance of images of the future and the effect of these images on events to come. Such images-dreams, visions, or whatever we call them-help to determine our actions, which, in turn, help shape the future, although not always in ways that we intend. Bell illustrates, partly with the story of his own life, how people remember such past images of the future and how the memories of them linger and are often used to judge the real outcomes of their lives. This is a fascinating view of the work of an important social scientist and the people and events that helped define his life. It is also about American higher education, especially from the end of World War II through the 1960s and 1970s, a period of educational transformation that included the spread of the merit system; the increase in ethnic, racial, gender, and social diversity among students and faculty; and a massive increase in research and knowledge..

This text features essays from Ammiel Alcalay covering Mediterranean culture, Arabic literature, the war in Bosnia, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the destruction of Carthage, and much more..

Mainly focusing on the transition in national identity experienced during the last years of Lee Teng-hui's tenure as President of Taiwan, ten essays, presented by Corcuff (Asian politics and Chinese language, U. de la Rochelle, France) explore how residents of Taiwan have begun to differentiate themselves from China in the past two decades. After exploring some of the historical roots of national identity, essays explore the symbolic representations of nationhood, the political constraints imposed by Chinese policy, the effect of political ideologies, and the relationship of national identity with processes of democratization. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies are inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself hinders efforts to move forward. Unhinging memory from the past, this book brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars who bring the future into the study of memory..

Whereas historical determinacy conceives the past as a complex and unstable network of causalities, this book asks how history can be related to a more radical future. To pose that question, it does not reject determinacy outright but rather seeks to explore how it works. In examining what it means to be "determined" by history, it also asks what kind of openings there might be in our encounters with history for interruptions, re-readings, and re-writings. Engaging texts spanning multiple genres and several centuries from John Locke to Maurice Blanchot, from Hegel to Benjamin Clift looks at experiences of time that exceed the historical narration of experiences said to have occurred in time. She focuses on the co-existence of multiple temporalities and opens up the quintessentially modern notion of historical succession to other possibilities. The alternatives she draws out include the mediations of language and narration, temporal leaps, oscillations and blockages, and the role played by contingency in representation. She argues that such alternatives compel us to reassess the ways we understand history and identity in a traumatic, or indeed in a post-traumatic, age..

Memory studies has become a rapidly growing area of scholarly as well as public interest. This volume brings together world experts to explore the current critical trends in this new academic field. It embraces work on diverse but interconnected phenomena, such as twenty-first century museums, shocking memorials in present-day Rwanda and the firsthand testimony of the victims of genocidal conflicts. The collection engages with pressing 'real world' issues, such as the furor around the recent 9/11 memorial, and what we really mean when we talk about 'trauma'..

While the memorialization of slavery has generated an impressive number of publications, relatively few studies deal with this subject from a transnational, transdisciplinary and transracial standpoint. As a historical phenomenon that crossed borders and traversed national communities and ethnic groups producing alliances that did not overlap with received identities, slavery as well as its memory call for comparative investigations that may bring to light aspects obscured by the predominant visibility of US-American and British narratives of the past. This study addresses the memory of slavery from a transnational perspective. It brings into dialogue texts and practices from the transatlantic world, offering comparative analyses which interlace the variety of memories emerging in diverse national contexts and fields of study and shed light on the ways local countermemories have interacted with and responded to hegemonic narratives of slavery. The inclusion of Brazil and the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean alongside the United States and Europe, and the variety of investigative approaches-ranging from cinema, popular culture and visual culture studies to anthropology and literary studies-expand the current understanding of the slave past and how it is reimagined today. This fascinating book brings freshness to the topic by considering objects of investigation which have so far remained marginal in the academic debate, such as heroic memorials, civic landscape, white family sagas, Young Adult literature of slavery, Latin American telenovelas and filmic narrations within and beyond Hollywood. What emerges is a multifarious set of memories, which keep changing according to generation, race, gender, nation and political urgency and indicate the advancing of a dynamic, mobilized memorialization of slavery willing to move beyond mourning towards a more militant stand for justice. This is an important book for those interested in African American, American, and Latin American studies and working across literature, cinema, visual arts, and public culture. It will also be useful to public official and civil servants interested in the question of slavery and its present memory..

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On the weekend of April 22, 2012 the St. Anne's Church website received thousands of visitors. That Sunday, in the New York Times Magazine, an article appeared about the Rev. Dr. Amy E. Richter competing in a physique competition. The strong reactions to the article got Richter and her husband and fellow clergyperson, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Pagano, thinking about the scandal of the Incarnation. The claim that God entered fully into our flesh-and-blood human existence makes some of us squeamish. And yet, this shocking claim is at the heart of the good news that in Christ God is with us no matter what. There is nothing that can happen to us--no pain, no humiliation, no anguish--that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. In sermons for the seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, Richter and Pagano proclaim the good news of the scandalous love of God in flesh and bone..

Imagine you are offered the opportunity to travel to any time in your past. You can either simply observe and remember or actually alter your life. Ben Tilifson has received this precise opportunity. Thinking it is a joke perpetrated by friends, he reluctantly decides to play along. Except it is not a joke. During Ben’s first trip, he coerces his fifty-five year younger self into speaking to a high school crush to whom he was originally too bashful to even say hello. The brief conversation changes his life forever. The girl introduces Ben to a friend that will become his wife. Realizing it’s not a joke or bad dream, Ben decides to continue his travels. Fearful of doing anything else that might alter his own life, he decides to devote his action to saving lives from terrible accidents. Upon returning from his most recent trip, Ben discovers his life has been dramatically transformed. A thorough review reveals that he must have traveled back in time simply to win a lottery. Memorizing the winning numbers, Ben travels twelve years into his past and purchases the winning ticket. He returns to a life even more altered than the one he just left. He is convinced he is somehow jumping between parallel yet different timelines. Recognizing the contradiction of time travel, Ben wonders what would happen if he reverses the action of his first trip. The surprise ending to the Temporal Consciousness Transposition presents a paradox that convinces Ben he has no free will..

The idea that our memories, in some sense, make us who we are, is a common one-and not at all implausible. After all, what could make us who we are if not the things we have experienced, thought, felt and desired on these idiosyncratic pathways through space and time that we call lives? And how can we retain these experiences, thoughts, feelings and desires if not through memory? On the other hand, most of what we have experienced has been forgotten. And there is now a considerable body of evidence that suggests that, even when we think we remember, our memories are likely to be distorted, sometimes beyond recognition. Imagine writing your autobiography, only to find that that most of it has been redacted, and much of the rest substantially rewritten. What would hold this book together? What would make it the unified and coherent account of a life? The answer, Mark Rowlands argues, lies, partially hidden, in a largely unrecognized form of memory-Rilkean memory. A Rilkean memory is produced when the content of a memory is lost but the act of remembering endures, in a new, mutated, form: a mood, a feeling, or a behavioral disposition. Rilkean memories play a significant role in holding the self together in the face of the poverty and inaccuracy of the contents of memory. But Rilkean memories are important not just because of what they are, but also because of what they were before they became such memories. Acts of remembering sculpt the contents of memories out of the slabs of remembered episodes. Our acts of remembering ensure that we are in the content of each of our memories-present in the way a sculptor is present in his creation-even when this content is lamentably sparse and endemically inaccurate..

The Wiley Handbook on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory presents a comprehensive overview of the latest, cutting-edge neuroscience research being done relating to the study of human memory and cognition. Features the analysis of original data using cutting edge methods in cognitive neuroscience research Presents a conceptually accessible discussion of human memory research Includes contributions from authors that represent a “who’s who” of human memory neuroscientists from the U.S. and abroad Supplemented with a variety of excellent and accessible diagrams to enhance comprehension.

Arguing that the major problems in epistemology have their roots in concerns about our control over our beliefs, David Owen presents a critical discussion of the current trends in contemporary epistemology..

The first global and comparative study of litigation in which refugees seek protection from a place of ostensible 'refuge'..

“Landslide is that rare book that somehow succeeds in being both knowing and open–hearted, both formally sly and emotionally direct. Its timeless subjects—grief, storytelling, the giving up of childish things—are rendered in ways that are as movingly honest as they are probing and unfamiliar. A swift, compelling read.” —Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone Minna Zallman Proctor's Landslide is a captivating collection of interconnected personal essays. These “true stories” explore the author’s complicated relationship with her mother—who was diagnosed with cancer at age fifty–seven and died fifteen years later—and the ways in which their connection was long the “prime mover” of Proctor’s life, the subtle force coursing beneath her adulthood. As such, these vibrant essays also narrate the trials and triumphs of Proctor’s own life—shifting between America and Italy (and loving “being a foreigner, the constant sense of unfamiliarity that supplanted all of my expectations and disappointments”), her bumpy first marriage, the profound pleasure she takes in motherhood, and the confounding experience of trying to arrange a Jewish burial for her “Jewish, not quite Jewish” mother. Proctor has an integrity and humor that is never extinguished despite life’s mounting difficulties. She also slyly questions her own narrative throughout. “Not having told this story before means I never fixed many details in my memory,” she writes. “[I] have to rely on flashes, the transparent stills that hang in my mind, made of smell, the way the light casts, the wind on skin.” The essays in this book are a sharply intelligent exploration of what happens when death and divorce unmoor you from certainties, and about the unreliable stories we tell ourselves, and others, in order to live..

The field of autobiographical memory has made dramatic advances since the first collection of papers in the area was published in 1986. Now, over 25 years on, this book reviews and integrates the many theories, perspectives, and approaches that have evolved over the last decades. A truly eminent collection of editors and contributors appraise the basic neural systems of autobiographical memory; its underlying cognitive structures and retrieval processes; how it develops in infancy and childhood, and then breaks down in aging; its social and cultural aspects; and its relation to personality and the self. Autobiographical memory has demonstrated a strong ability to establish clear empirical generalizations, and has shown its practical relevance by deepening our understanding of several clinical disorders - as well as the induction of false memories in the legal system. It has also become an important topic for brain studies, and helped to enlarge our general understanding of the brain..

This thesis evaluates the viability of ferroelectric Si:HfO2 and its derived FeFET application for non-volatile data storage. At the beginning, the ferroelectric effect is explained briefly such that the applications that make use of it can be understood. Afterwards, the latest findings on ferroelectric HfO2 are reviewed and their potential impact on future applications is discussed. Experimental data is presented afterwards focusing on the ferroelectric material characteristics of Si:HfO2 that are most relevant for memory applications. Besides others, the stability of the ferroelectric switching effect could be demonstrated in a temperature range of almost 400 K. Moreover, nanosecond switching speed and endurance in the range of 1 million to 10 billion cycles could be proven. Retention and imprint characteristics have furthermore been analyzed and are shown to be stable for 1000 hours bake time at 125 oC. Derived from the ferroelectric effect in HfO2, a 28 nm FeFET memory cell is introduced as the central application of this thesis. Based on numerical simulations, the memory concept is explained and possible routes towards an optimized FeFET cell are discussed. Subsequently, the results from electrical characterization of FeFET multi-structures are presented and discussed. By using Si:HfO2 it was possible to realize the world's first 28 nm FeFET devices possessing i.a. 10k cycling endurance and an extrapolated 10 year data retention at room temperature. The next step towards a FeFET memory is represented by connecting several memory cells into matrix-type configurations. A cell concept study illustrates the different ways in which FeFET cells can be combined together to give high density memory arrays. For the proposed architectures, operational schemes are theoretically discussed and analyzed by both electrical characterization of FeFET multi-structures and numerical simulations. The thesis concludes with the electrical characterization of small FeFET memory arrays. First results show that a separation between memory states can be achieved by applying poling and incremental step pulse programming (ISPP) sequences. These results represent an important cornerstone for future studies on Si:HfO2 and its related applications..