Ming porcelain is widely regarded among the world's finest cultural treasures. From ordinary household items patiently refined for imperial use, porcelain became a dynamic force in domestic consumption in China and a valuable commodity in export trade. In the modern era, it has reached unprecedented heights in art auctions and other avenues of global commerce. This book examines the impact of consumption on the evolution of porcelain and its transformation into a foreign cultural icon. The book begins with an examination of ways in which porcelain was appreciated in Ming China, followed by a discussion of encounters with Ming porcelain in several global regions including Europe and the Americas. The book also looks at the invention of the phrase and concept of 'the Ming vase' in English-speaking cultures and concludes with a history of the transformation of Ming porcelain into works of art.

“There they rest, inert, impertinent, in gallery space—those book forms either imitated or mutilated, replicas of reading matter or its vestiges. Strange, after its long and robust career, for the book to take early retirement in a museum, not as rare manuscript but as functionless sculpture. Readymade or constructed, such book shapes are canceled as text when deposited as gallery objects, shut off from their normal reading when not, in some yet more drastic way, dismembered or reassembled.” So begins Bookwork, which follows our passion for books to its logical extreme in artists who employ found or simulated books as a sculptural medium. Investigating the conceptual labor behind this proliferating international art practice, Garrett Stewart looks at hundreds of book-like objects, alone or as part of gallery installations, in this original account of works that force attention upon a book’s material identity and cultural resonance. Less an inquiry into the artist’s book than an exploration of the book form’s contemporary objecthood, Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach traces the lineage of these aggressive artifacts from the 1919 Unhappy Readymade of Marcel Duchamp down to the current crisis of paper-based media in the digital era. Bookwork surveys and illustrates a stunning variety of appropriated and fabricated books alike, ranging from hacksawed discards to the giant lead folios of Anselm Kiefer. The unreadable books Stewart engages with in this timely study are found, again and again, to generate graphic metaphors for the textual experience they preclude, becoming in this sense legible after all.

Cocoa is one of the principal application environments for Mac OS X; its advanced object-oriented APIs allow users to develop in both Java and Objective-C. This revolutionary new way of developing sophisticated applications for the Macintosh is both powerful and easy. Written by insiders at Apple Computer, this book provides information that can't be found anywhere else--giving users a potential leg up in the Mac OS X application development market.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Ole-Johan Dahl who passed away in June 2002 at the age of 70, shortly after he had received, together with his colleague Kristen Nygaard, the ACM Alan M. Turing Award: "For ideas fundamental to the emergence of object-oriented programming, through their design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67." This Festschrift opens with a short biography and a bibliography recollecting Ole-Johan Dahl's life and work, as well as a paper he wrote entitled: "The Birth of Object-Orientation: the Simula Languages." The main part of the book consists of 14 scientific articles written by leading scientists who worked with Ole-Johan Dahl as students or colleagues. In accordance with the scope of Ole-Johan Dahl's work and the book's title, the articles are centered around object-orientation and formal methods.

This intriguing and compact book investigates whether or not philosophy can have a use in the face of ‘capitalist realism’ today. Can philosophy study everyday objects like computers and mobile phones? Can it think of advertising, the population, electricity, buildings and even dreams as ‘objects’ in their own right, which convey particular and novel qualities when analysed? Johns’ book starts from an immanent phenomenological study of objects, arguing that such objects disclose larger systems of anthropological meaning and control. The author moves away from the Husserlian ‘essence’ of the object and embeds his objects in a series of ‘uses’ (or ‘equipment’ as Heidegger called it). However, Johns makes a speculative move by positing the very existence of such ‘uses’ distinct from the human and first person phenomenological consciousness. This is when the annals of phenomenology meet contemporary strands of realism such as Speculative and Object Oriented models. For Johns, the world is in a constant state of being utilised, not merely through humans but through objects and their relations, and not only on a macro scale but on a micro scale (described by the theories of quantum physics). The object then becomes a locus of use, yet, importantly, one that can never be reduced to relations alone. This is because the author believes that certain aspects of a relation withholds itself in its act of relating. The mutual dynamics of relation and property are thus rearticulated in a new light. This novel description of relation places Johns squarely between relational ontologies (such as Deleuze, Latour and Garcia) and non-relational ontologies (Harman). This work is invaluable to researchers and any reader of contemporary philosophy in the age of advanced technology and capitalism.

Computer Science Workbench is a monograph series which will provide you with an in depth working knowledge of current developments in computer technology. Every volume in this series will deal with a topic of importance in computer science and elaborate on how you yourself can build systems related to the main theme. You will be able to develop a variety of systems, including computer software tools, computer graphics, computer animation, database management systems, and computer-aided design and manufacturing systems. Computer Science Workbench represents an important new contribution in the field of practical computer technology. Tosiyasu L. Kunii Preface The goal of this book is to give concrete answers to questions such as what object oriented databases are, why they are needed, how they are implemented, and how they are applied, by describing a research prototype object-oriented database system called Jasmine. That is, this book is aimed at creating a consistent view to object-oriented databases. The contents of this book are directly based on the results of the Jasmine project conducted at Fujitsu Laboratories, Ltd. The book is a polished version of my doctoral dissertation, which includes research papers which I have authored and published.