A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day

A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day Review

Conceived in the 1960s, Walt Disney’s original plans for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) outlined a utopian laboratory for domestic technology, where families would live, work, and play in an integrated environment. Like many of his contemporaries, Disney imagined homes that would attend to their inhabitants’ every need, and he regarded the home as a site of unending technological progress. This fixation on “space-age” technology, with its promise of domestic bliss, marked an important mid-twentieth-century shift in understandings of the American home. In A Small World, Davin Heckman considers how domestic technologies that free people to enjoy leisure time in the home have come to be understood as necessary parts of everyday life.

Heckman’s narrative stretches from the early-twentieth-century introduction into the home of electric appliances and industrial time-management techniques, through the postwar advent of television and the space-age “house of tomorrow,” to the contemporary automated, networked “smart home.” He considers all these developments in relation to lifestyle and consumer narratives. Building on the tension between agency and control within the walls of homes designed to anticipate and fulfill desires, Heckman engages debates about lifestyle, posthumanism, and rights under the destabilizing influences of consumer technologies, and he considers the utopian and dystopian potential of new media forms. Heckman argues that the achievement of an environment completely attuned to its inhabitants’ specific wants and needs—what he calls the “Perfect Day”—institutionalizes everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice.

Salesmanship Practices And Problems

Salesmanship Practices And Problems Review

SALESMANSHIP PRACTICES AND PROBLEMS The quality of the materials used in the manufacture of this book is governed by continued post-war shortages. PREFACE So much has already been written about salesmanship that the only justification for another book is that it presents a new approach to the subject. This volume is a departure from the usual text on salesmanship in that it is neither inspirational, anecdotal, psychological, nor economic. The unique aim of this book is to present successful salesman ship as a simple process of overcoming twenty fundamental problems commonly encountered in selling goods and services. The authors conception of selling is that it is essentially a method of dealing with difficulties which are created by a sales man himself, his product, and his prospects. A successful salesman experiences little trouble in surmounting these prob lems an unsuccessful salesman fails because he cannot overcome these basic difficulties met in selling. These fundamental problems are experienced in selling every variety of product and service and with all types of prospects. They often are present before a salesman comes face to face with a prospective customer and they often exist long after an order has been secured. Many of the problems confronting an indi vidual salesman are of his own making, arising from his personality, habits, health, education, and attitude. Other problems are created for him by prospective purchasers and are a result of their experience, personality, education, needs, ability to buy, and authority. After critical observation of the work of many salesmen of numerous products and services, consultation with many types of buyers, conferences with salesmen and sales executives, and consideration of the authors personal experience as a salesman, sales executive, and trainer of salesmen, twenty of the most common problems encountered in this occupation were selected as representative of the difficulties met by salesmen in selling all kinds of products and services. Each of these problems is repre sented by a chapter in this book. vi PREFACE After these twenty basic problems of salesmen were selected, genuine sales situations, depicting the methods employed by salesmen in dealing with these fundamental problems, next were sought. Several unique methods were employed in procuring actual interviews between salesmen and prospects. Micro phones were installed in the offices of buyers of various types of products and services and the actual conversations between salesmen and these buyers were recorded on wax cylinders in adjoining offices. These records were obtained without knowl edge of the salesmen. Transcriptions from these records pro duced several hundred pages of verbatim sales conversations. In addition, investigators, equipped with dictographs and ear phones, listened in on hundreds of sales interviews and rated the difficulties of salesmen on eighty separate points, including open ing remarks, personality factors, objections encountered, strategy in dealing with price, competition, closing the sale, etc. Investigators were assigned also to accompany salesmen on the job to record their remarks, methods, time employment, and difficulties encountered. Posing as purchasers, investigators also shopped retail stores and made verbatim records of the presenta tions of retail salesmen and the problems encountered by them in a wide variety of retail establishments. Critical observations were made of the methods used by these salesmen in meeting these problems. As a result of these investigations carried on over a period of two years, many genuine records of sales interviews illustrating the twenty common problems encountered by salesmen were secured, and two or more are included with each chapter. These interviews are the first actual records of what salesmen say to buyers that huvo been published in book form...

The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment

The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment Review

Winner of the 2009 Gerald L. Young Book Award in Human Ecology given by the Society for Human Ecology.

The Shadows of Consumption gives a hard-hitting diagnosis: many of the earth's ecosystems and billions of its people are at risk from the consequences of rising consumption. Products ranging from cars to hamburgers offer conveniences and pleasures; but, as Peter Dauvergne makes clear, global political and economic processes displace the real costs of consumer goods into distant ecosystems, communities, and timelines, tipping into crisis people and places without the power to resist.

In The Shadows of Consumption, Peter Dauvergne maps the costs of consumption that remain hidden in the shadows cast by globalized corporations, trade, and finance. He traces the environmental consequences of five commodities: automobiles, gasoline, refrigerators, beef, and harp seals. In these fascinating histories we learn, for example, that American officials ignored warnings about the dangers of lead in gasoline in the 1920s; why China is now a leading producer of CFC-free refrigerators; and how activists were able to stop Canada's commercial seal hunt in the 1980s (but are unable to do so now).

Dauvergne's innovative analysis allows us to see why so many efforts to manage the global environment are failing even as environmentalism is slowly strengthening. He proposes a guiding principle of "balanced consumption" for both consumers and corporations. We know that we can make things better by driving a fuel-efficient car, eating locally grown food, and buying energy-efficient appliances; but these improvements are incremental, local, and insufficient. More crucial than our individual efforts to reuse and recycle will be reforms in the global political economy to reduce the inequalities of consumption and correct the imbalance between growing economies and environmental sustainability.

The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio

The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio Review

The average American listens to the radio three hours a day. In light of recent technological developments such as internet radio, some argue that the medium is facing a crisis, while others claim we are at the dawn of a new radio revolution. The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio is an essential single-volume reference guide to this vital and evolving medium. It brings together the best and most important entries from the three-volume Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio, edited by Christopher Sterling.

Comprised of more than 300 entries spanning the invention of radio to the Internet, The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio addresses personalities, music genres, regulations, technology, programming and stations, the "golden age" of radio and other topics relating to radio broadcasting throughout its history. The entries are updated throughout and the volume includes nine new entries on topics ranging from podcasting to the decline of radio. The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio include suggestions for further reading as complements to most of the articles, biographical details for all person-entries, production credits for programs, and a comprehensive index.

Guide to Collecting Cookbooks

Guide to Collecting Cookbooks Review

A well-researched guide for cookbook collectors, loaded with histories, dates, sizes, and values. Hundreds of examples of cookbooks and booklets from many years are photographed in full color and black and white. 2002 values. AUTHORBIO: Bob Allen has been a lifetime collector of cookbooks, anda longstanding active member of the Cookbook Collectors Club of America for many years. His book, A Guide to Collecting Cookbooks, has seen many updated reprintings. His book includes six different collections and years of research. REVIEW: This reference guide contains thousands of listings and values for every type of cookbook imaginable, and includes biographies on culinary experts, color photographs, and chapters on the most popular cookbooks.

Bungalow Kitchens

Bungalow Kitchens Review

Filled with handsome photographs of retro-style kitchens, this is a "what to" book for those who want to learn how to restore or re-create a bungalow-era kitchen. It is filled with invaluable information describing what was in these kitchens, when it was available, and how it went together. You will be inspired to re-create the Bungalow aesthetic of old while enjoying contemporary conveniences. (20000101)

Envy of the World: A History of the US Economy and Big Business

Envy of the World: A History of the US Economy and Big Business Review

Envy of the World is a history of the rise and development of the American economy and Big Business over four centuries and how the individual and collective actions of Americans, native born and foreign, came to create the .6 trillion economy of today. Although the building American juggernaut was blessed above other nations with all manner of natural resources, the inventiveness and drive of the American people made the most of what Providence had bestowed. Steadily, then more swiftly, the foundation was laid for success. More intimate knowledge of economic reality and theory in the 20th century led ultimately to the world's greatest economy of today. At time of this writing in 2006, following a presidential election campaign characterized by harsh criticism of special moneyed interests and foreign outsourcing of labor, many Americans have taken a dim view of Big Business and the federal government's management of the economy. This book does not shrink from pointing out episodes of corporate greed and malfeasance as well as mistakes by Washington both in the recent and distant past. However, the impression is epidemic among the populace that the advances and conveniences of a modern society are the God-given right of Americans. In point of fact, the cornucopia of excellence that exists in food and household products, clothing and consumer durables, housing and motor vehicle transportation, health care and high tech industry, and other goods and services, would not be available to the majority of citizens but for the ambition, effort, and, yes, self-interest of entrepreneurs who founded, grew, and consolidated private enterprise companies. Further, the sometimes contradictory efforts by government officials to balance the interests of corporations, societal groups, and individuals have created by-and-large a most beneficial atmosphere for economic endeavor. The book provides periodic quantitative summation of gross domestic product, population, employment, company results, and other statistics, particularly in later chapters. Because the author's philosophy is that a picture and a thousand words are better than either one alone, he has made extensive use of original charts and graphs, illustrations, industry genealogies, and maps. ***