Cynicism often seems a smarter choice than idealism. There are reasons for this. Politicians have disappointed us time and again; trusted institutions have proven to be self-serving and corrupt; hopes for lasting world peace repeatedly have been dashed; and social inequities persist and increase, unabated by even the grandest of charitable efforts. It is now considered foolish to think that people can be counted on to rise above their narrow self-interests to serve the broader good, or to tell the truth if it does not reflect well on the self. Supporting this bleak view of the human condition is a moral psychology that has taken increasingly cynical turns in recent years. Famous studies have shown that we have an almost unlimited potential for cruelty when placed in the wrong situations. The Power of Ideals presents a different vision, supported by a different kind of evidence. It examines the lives and work of six 20th century moral leaders who pursued moral causes ranging from world peace to social justice and human rights. Using these six cases to illustrate how people can make choices guided by their moral convictions, rather than by base emotion or social pressures, authors William Damon and Anne Colby explore the workings of three virtues: inner truthfulness, humility, and faith. Through their portrayal of the noble lives of moral leaders, the authors argue that all of us--with ordinary lives--can exercise control over important life decisions and pursue ideals that we believe in.

This book discusses regular powers and symbolic powers of ideals from three perspectives– algebra, combinatorics and geometry – and examines the interactions between them. It invites readers to explore the evolution of the set of associated primes of higher and higher powers of an ideal and explains the evolution of ideals associated with combinatorial objects like graphs or hypergraphs in terms of the original combinatorial objects. It also addresses similar questions concerning our understanding of the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of powers of combinatorially defined ideals in terms of the associated combinatorial data. From a more geometric point of view, the book considers how the relations between symbolic and regular powers can be interpreted in geometrical terms. Other topics covered include aspects of Waring type problems, symbolic powers of an ideal and their invariants (e.g., the Waldschmidt constant, the resurgence), and the persistence of associated primes.

Ten years of research uncover the secret source of growth and profit … Those who center their business on improving people’s lives have a growth rate triple that of competitors and outperform the market by a huge margin. They dominate their categories, create new categories and maximize profit in the long term. Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Grow is based on unprecedented empirical research, inspired (when Stengel was Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble) by a study of companies growing faster than P&G. After leaving P&G in 2008, Stengel designed a new study, in collaboration with global research firm Millward Brown Optimor. This study tracked the connection over a ten year period between financial performance and customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. Then, in a further investigation of what goes on in the “black box” of the consumer’s mind, Stengel and his team tapped into neuroscience research to look at customer engagement and measure subconscious attitudes to determine whether the top businesses in the Stengel Study were more associated with higher ideals than were others. Grow thus deftly blends timeless truths about human behavior and values into an action framework – how you discover, build, communicate, deliver and evaluate your ideal. Through colorful stories drawn from his fascinating personal experiences and “deep dives” that bring out the true reasons for such successes as the Pampers, HP, Discovery Channel, Jack Daniels and Zappos, Grow unlocks the code for twenty-first century business success.

What is it exactly that makes a governments good or bad? One of Britain's leading theoreticians and practitioners of government explains how governments work, how they should work, and why good government matters.

Ideal for graduate students and researchers, this book presents a unified treatment of the central notions of integral closure.

Besides giving an introduction to Commutative Algebra - the theory of c- mutative rings - this book is devoted to the study of projective modules and the minimal number of generators of modules and ideals. The notion of a module over a ring R is a generalization of that of a vector space over a field k. The axioms are identical. But whereas every vector space possesses a basis, a module need not always have one. Modules possessing a basis are called free. So a finitely generated free R-module is of the form Rn for some n E IN, equipped with the usual operations. A module is called p- jective, iff it is a direct summand of a free one. Especially a finitely generated R-module P is projective iff there is an R-module Q with P @ Q S Rn for some n. Remarkably enough there do exist nonfree projective modules. Even there are nonfree P such that P @ Rm S Rn for some m and n. Modules P having the latter property are called stably free. On the other hand there are many rings, all of whose projective modules are free, e. g. local rings and principal ideal domains. (A commutative ring is called local iff it has exactly one maximal ideal. ) For two decades it was a challenging problem whether every projective module over the polynomial ring k[X1,. . .

This book shows how the circulation of ideals associated with the Roman emperor generated ideological unification among aristocracies and reinforced Roman power.

The author of Greater Expectations cites rising levels of young people who are entering adulthood without a clear sense of purpose, explaining how parents and educators can productively assist children to discover and responsibly pursue their true interests. Reprint.

The widely respected social philosopher embarks on his most gripping and broadly appealing work, asking the ultimate question of human nature: Why do we repeatedly violate our most deeply held values and beliefs? After nearly forty years of weighing humanity's deepest dilemmas-working in settings ranging from university and high school classrooms to corporate offices and hospitals-bestselling author, philosopher, and religious scholar Jacob Needleman presents the most urgent, deeply felt, and widely accessible work of his career. In Why Can't We Be Good? Needleman identifies the core problem that therapists and social philosophers fail to see. He depicts the individual human as a being who knows what is good, yet who remains mysteriously helpless to innerly adopt the ethical, moral, and religious ideas that are bequeathed to him.

One of the principal moral and psychological problems of our time is whether humane ideals can be defended. Loss of faith in the objectivity of ethics has encouraged a sense of hopelessness. The notion that no ideal is better than any other, that a humane commitment has no rational advantage over Nietzsche's contempt for ordinary people, has been accused of leaving our civilization without self-confidence or a purpose. James R. Flynn rejects attempts to salvage ethical objectivity as futile and counterproductive. Instead, he uses philosophical analysis to demonstrate the relevance of logic and evidence to moral debate. He then uses modern social science to refute racists, Social Darwinists, Nietzsche, and the meritocracy thesis of The Bell Curve. Flynn concludes that the great post-Enlightenment project?justice for all races and classes, the reduction of inequality, and the abolition of privilege?retains its moral dignity and relevance.