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Free Download Useful Complaints : How Petitions Assist Decentralized Authoritarianism in China By Jing Chen
2016 | 205 Pages | ISBN: 149853452X | EPUB | 1 MB
This book develops an informational theory to account for the coexistence of China's exceptionally resilient authoritarianism and its high decentralization. The nuanced information contained in citizens' complaints, which are filed through the petition system, helps to sustain China's decentralized authoritarianism in three important ways. First, petitions help to alleviate the information asymmetry problem that arises when the central government has less information than lower level governments do. When studying citizens' petitions, higher level governments can obtain valuable and accurate information about local officials' performance in policy implementation, public goods provision, and corruption. Higher level governments need this information in order to effectively utilize the cadre management system to reward good performance and punish malpractice. The result of this interaction is the PRC's relatively high quality of governance and effective control of local officials. There is also a second way in which citizens' petitions help the government to overcome the dictator's dilemma that arises when an authoritarian regime is uncertain about how much support it really enjoys among its citizens. Citizens' specific grievances are revealed in these petitions and are mostly addressed in their beginning stages. When citizens' complaints are rooted in central policy, they set the agenda for policy change in order to maintain social order. There is yet a third benefit conferred upon the PRC by the petition system. Thanks to the petition system, the central government can present itself as the ally of citizens when it addresses the matters raised by their petitions. As a result, the petition system grants the central government an opportunity to hold local officials accountable, scapegoat local authorities, divide citizens and local officials, and justly claim all the credit when its policies succeed. This helps to build citizens' trust in their central government and reinforces its legitimacy in their eyes. In Huntington's terms, the Chinese Communist Party institutionalizes mass support by addressing citizens' grievances expressed through the channel of communication provided by the petition system. In this sense, the complaints of citizens can be very useful tools for regime maintenance. The author substantiates these points with case studies and statistical analysis.

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Free Download Upgrade: The No-Bullsh*t Guide to Levelling Up Your Life by Paul Mort
English | January 16, 2025 | ISBN: 0008718024 | 256 pages | PDF | 1.72 Mb
Don't just chase your goals, smash them - with this empowering, action-filled approach...

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Free Download Up Pops: Paper Engineering with Elastic Bands by Mark Hiner
English | July 28, 2023 | ISBN: 1913565491 | PDF | 531 Mb
This authoritative book illustrates in dynamic form mechanisms used in making popup books that utilise elastic bands. It offers many imaginative possibilities for the hobbyist, or the student of design and technology. Each of ten basic mechanisms is illustrated by a working model which you can cut out and make. When finished, each working model glues back into the book on a special tab and folds away to make a kind of three dimensional dictionary or encyclopaedia. For each working model there is also a page called technical considerations which points out important features of the mechanism and suggests how it might be used to create original designs of your own.

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Free Download Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities by Jack Cashill
English | July 4, 2023 | ISBN: 1637586469 | 288 pages | PDF | 2.91 Mb
Long accused of racism and "white flight," the ethnic Americans driven from their homes and neighborhoods-the author included-finally get the chance to tell their side of the story.

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Free Download Unlock Data Agility with Composable Data Architecture by Adam Morton
English | 2024 | ISBN: 9781098178956 | 90 pages | PDF | 2.07 Mb
Are your data systems slowing down your AI initiatives? The potential of AI to revolutionize business is undeniable, but many organizations struggle to bridge the gap between ambitious ideas and real-world results. The cause? Traditional data architectures remain too rigid and siloed to support today's dynamic, data-intensive demands.

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Free Download University Partnerships for International Development By Barbara Cozza; Patrick Blessinger
2016 | 283 Pages | ISBN: 1786353024 | EPUB | 1 MB
This volume examines the diverse ways universities and colleges around the world are partnering and collaborating with other institutions to fulfill their missions and visions. University partnerships not only include collaborations between universities but also include university-school (basic education) collaborative partnerships to improve local school systems. The increasing pressures to remove access and participation barriers, and the increasing pressures to mitigate practices that restrict the free flow of education across borders have created a growing global space for educational services of all types. As a result, traditional institutional boundaries have expanded to better respond to increasing pressures placed on them by the growing demand for higher education services. The boundaries between educational institutions and other entities such as government, business, and non-profit organizations have become more fluid and this has resulted in increased involvement by institutions, faculty, and students in activities outside the traditional boundaries of the classroom. This edited volume will specifically explore university partnerships for international development.

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Free Download Universities, Ethics and Professions : Debate and Scrutiny By John Strain; Ronald Barnett; Peter Jarvis
2009 | 204 Pages | ISBN: 0415991196 | EPUB | 1 MB
Every business and organization today needs to impress stakeholders with its ethics policy. Universities, Ethics and Professions examines how this emphasis on ethics by the professional world is impacting universities, institutions that have long been key contributors to ethical reflection and debate, and shapers of ethical discourse. Changing objectives, globalization, and public concerns continue to bring professionalism, and commercialization, into the dialogue about what ethics mean on campus. Universities, Ethics and Professions offers an in-depth examination of the changing landscape of academic ethics, with case-study analysis from sociologists, educationalists, management specialists and philosophers. As professionalism becomes an integral part of university teaching, training, and research, this book considers the impact on the ethical practices of academics, and explores the importance of universities remaining sites of open discourse on ethics in the future.

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Free Download Unity in Christ and Country : American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758-1801 By William Harrison Taylor
2017 | 199 Pages | ISBN: 081739088X | PDF | 1 MB
Examines the interdenominational pursuits of the American Presbyterian Church from 1758 to 1801 In Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758-1801, William Harrison Taylor investigates the American Presbyterian Church's pursuit of Christian unity and demonstrates how, through this effort, the church helped to shape the issues that gripped the American imagination, including evangelism, the conflict with Great Britain, slavery, nationalism, and sectionalism. When the colonial Presbyterian Church reunited in 1758, a nearly twenty-year schism was brought to an end. To aid in reconciling the factions, church leaders called for Presbyterians to work more closely with other Christian denominations. Their ultimate goal was to heal divisions, not just within their own faith but also within colonial North America as a whole. Taylor contends that a self-imposed interdenominational transformation began in the American Presbyterian Church upon its reunion in 1758. However, this process was altered by the church's experience during the American Revolution, which resulted in goals of Christian unity that had both spiritual and national objectives. Nonetheless, by the end of the century, even as the leaders in the Presbyterian Church strove for unity in Christ and country, fissures began to develop in the church that would one day divide it and further the sectional rift that would lead to the Civil War. Taylor engages a variety of sources, including the published and unpublished works of both the Synods of New York and Philadelphia and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, as well as numerous published and unpublished Presbyterian sermons, lectures, hymnals, poetry, and letters. Scholars of religious history, particularly those interested in the Reformed tradition, and specifically Presbyterianism, should find Unity in Christ and Country useful as a way to consider the importance of the theology's intellectual and pragmatic implications for members of the faith.

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Free Download United in Discontent : Local Responses to Cosmopolitanism and Globalization By Dimitrios Theodossopoulos; Elisabeth Kirtsoglou
2009 | 194 Pages | ISBN: 0857458094 | PDF | 1 MB
Cosmopolitanism is often discussed in a critical and disapproving manner: as a concept complicit with the interests of the powerful, or as a notion related to Western political supremacy, the ills of globalization, inequality, and capitalist economic penetration. Seen as the moral justification for embracing or tolerating cultural difference, ethnically and socially diverse communities unenthusiastic with change, develop an acknowledgement of their common position vis-à-vis a western, "universal" political point of view. By means of exploring the idiosyncratic form of political intimacy generated by anti-cosmopolitanism, and assuming an analytical and critical stance towards the concepts of parochialism and localism, this volume examines the political consciousness of such negatively predisposed actors, and it attempts to explain their reservation towards the sincerity of international politics, their reliance on conspiracy theories or nationalist narratives, their introversion.

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Free Download Unemployed Youth and Social Exclusion in Europe : Learning for Inclusion? By Susan Warner Weil; Danny Wildemeersch; Barry Percy-Smith; Theo Jansen
2005 | 290 Pages | ISBN: 0754641309 | EPUB | 1 MB
This book confronts readers with questions emerging from the 'gap' between EU aspirations to reduce youth unemployment without increasing social exclusion - and what is actually happening in practice. Aimed at a diverse readership, it is based on a three year European Union (EU) project into education, training, guidance and employment (ETG) programmes for young adults across six countries. Insights are grounded in the lives and stories of disadvantaged young adults, and of those who work with them, bringing to life unintended impacts of well intended interventions. The authors consider the influence of shifting political and pedagogical ideologies in the EU on local practices and young peoples' lives and choices. They also consider the impact of policy and performance management discourses 'on the ground'. This work uses rigorous yet innovative narrative forms to invite readers into a 'whole system' inquiry into these complexities. Unemployed Youth and Social Exclusion in Europe will make an important contribution to reflecting critically on current policy and practice, as well as to academic understandings of unemployed youth, and restrictive and reflexive approaches to learning for inclusion across Europe.

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