Bent Sørensen - Böcker

Hitherto, there has been no book that attempted to sum up the breadth of Umberto Eco’s work and it importance for the study of semiotics, communication and cognition. There have been anthologies and overviews of Eco’s work within Eco Studies; sometimes, works in semiotics have used aspects of Eco’s work. Yet, thus far, there has been no overview of the work of Eco in the breadth of semiotics. This volume is a contribution to both semiotics and Eco studies. The 40 scholars who participate in the volume come from a variety of disciplines but have all chosen to work with a favorite quotation from Eco that they find particularly illustrative of the issues that his work raises. Some of the scholars have worked exegetically placing the quotation within a tradition, others have determined the (epistemic) value of the quotation and offered a critique, while still others have seen the quotation as a starting point for conceptual developments within a field of application. However, each article within this volume points toward the relevance of Eco -- for contemporary studies concerning semiotics, communication and cognition.

Life-cycle assessment of new energy solutions plays an important role in discussions about global warming mitigation options and the evaluation of concrete energy production and conversion installations.This book starts by describing the methodology of life-cycle analysis and life-cycle assessment of new energy solutions. It then goes on to cover, in detail, a range of applications to individual energy installations, national supply systems, and to the global energy system in a climate impact context. Coverage is not limited to issues related to commercial uses by consultants according to ISO norms. It also emphasizes life-cycle studies as an open-ended scientific discipline embracing economic issues of cost, employment, equity, foreign trade balances, ecological sustainability, and a range of geo-political and social issues.A wealth of applications are described and a discussion on the results obtained in each study is included. Example areas are fossil and nuclear power plants, renewable energy systems, and systems based on hydrogen or batteries as energy carriers. The analysis is continued to the end-users of energy, where energy use in transportation, industry and home are scrutinized for their life-cycle impacts. Biofuel production and the combustion of firewood in home fireplaces and stoves are amongst the issues discussed.A central theme of the book is global warming. The impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are meticulously mapped at a depth far beyond that of the IPCC reports. A novel and surprising finding is that more lives will be saved than lost as a direct consequence of a warmer climate. After a 2ºC increase in temperature, the reduction in death rates in areas with cold winters would outweigh the increase in the death rates in hot climates. However, this is only one of several impacts from greenhouse gases, and the remaining ones are still overwhelmingly negative. The fact that some population groups may benefit from higher temperatures (notably the ones most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions) whilst others (who did not contribute much to the problem) suffer is one of the main points of the book. The book is suitable as a university textbook and as a reference source for engineers, managers and public bodies responsible for planning and licensing.

Cultural Text Studies is a research project initiated by the Department of Languages, Culture and Aesthetics at Aalborg University. The present introductory volume launches a series of themed monographs which will be edited by researchers at the Dept., occasionally aided by friends and associates from other programmes. The purpose of the series is to be a forum for the publication of results of research in the broadly defined area of cultural text. CTS -- An Introduction is a volume authored by present and past members of the English programme's teaching staff in the fields of culture, literature, and media studies. The essays range widely in terms of the period, genre, and medium of the texts investigated. Focus areas include Victorian literature and art; high modernism, especially approached from the point of view of a centre/margin discourse; and finally postmodernist aesthetics and its embedded move from literary into cultural studies, as witnessed by essays on world music, shoes, Hollywood, the post-ironic, the deterritorialised, and the post-human condition as cultural texts.