The Workshop on Residential Kitchen Fire Suppression Research Needs was held on April 11, 2006, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD. The Workshop provided a forum to discuss test methods, technologies, and research and development that can significantly improve residential fire protection, with emphasis on residential kitchenapplications. The Workshop program included representatives from standards, codes, testing, and research organizations, the fire protection industry, the fireservice, and federal government agencies. In total, 30 people attended. The goal of the conference was to identify barriers that impede advances in the application oflocalized suppression systems in residences. In this regard, the Workshop explored: recent developments in suppression system technologies, characterization of the performance of residential kitchen fire suppressionsystems, the role of federal agencies and standards groups, and opportunities for collaboration. The workshop attendees were divided into two breakout groups todiscuss the following questions: (*) What is needed to reduce losses from kitchen fires? * Focus on prevention? * Focus on suppression? (*) What are the prioritizedresearch needs for kitchen fires? (*) What needs to be done in order to place effective retrofit systems into a significant number of homes? The results of eachgroup's deliberations were discussed when the full Workshop reconvened. The responses from each group were considered and listed so that attendees couldvote on the issues that they felt were most important. Attendees were grouped by their affiliation with the standards, codes, testing and research organizations, orthe fire protection industry, or the fire service for purposes of voting.

Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging — in an entirely unprecedented manner — the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter—energy itself. A Swerve Edition.

Established by Congress in 1901, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has a long and distinguished history as the custodian and disseminator of the United States' standards of physical measurement. Having reached its centennial anniversary, the NBS/NIST reflects on and celebrates its first century with this book describing some of its seminal contributions to science and technology. Within these pages are 102 vignettes that describe some of the Institute's classic publications. Each vignette relates the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the authors. The groundbreaking works depicted include: A breakthrough paper on laser-cooling of atoms below the Doppler limit, which led to the award of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics to William D. Phillips The official report on the development of the radio proximity fuse, one of the most important new weapons of World War II The 1932 paper reporting the discovery of deuterium in experiments that led to Harold Urey's1934 Nobel Prize for Chemistry A review of the development of the SEAC, the first digital computer to employ stored programs and the first to process images in digital form The first paper demonstrating that parity is not conserved in nuclear physics, a result that shattered a fundamental concept of theoretical physics and led to a Nobel Prize for T. D. Lee and C. Y. Yang "Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor," a 1995 paper that has already opened vast new areas of research A landmark contribution to the field of protein crystallography by Wlodawer and coworkers on the use of joint x-ray and neutron diffraction to determine the structure of proteins