An Introduction To Driftwood Art

An Introduction to Driftwood Art

Aquananotechnology

The world’s fresh water supplies are dwindling rapidly—even wastewater is now considered an asset. By 2025, most of the world's population will be facing serious water stresses and shortages. Aquananotechnology: Global Prospects breaks new ground with its informative and innovative introduction of the application of nanotechnology to the remediation of contaminated water for drinking and industrial use. It provides a comprehensive overview, from a global perspective, of the latest research and developments in the use of nanotechnology for water purification and desalination methods. The book also covers approaches to remediation such as high surface area nanoscale media for adsorption of toxic species, UV treatment of pathogens, and regeneration of saturated media with applications in municipal water supplies, produced water from fracking, ballast water, and more. It also discusses membranes, desalination, sensing, engineered polymers, magnetic nanomaterials, electrospun nanofibers, photocatalysis, endocrine disruptors, and Al13 clusters. It explores physics-based phenomena such as subcritical water and cavitation-induced sonoluminescence, and fog harvesting. With contributions from experts in developed and developing countries, including those with severe contamination, such as China, India, and Pakistan, the book’s content spans a wide range of the subject areas that fall under the aquananotechnology banner, either squarely or tangentially. The book strongly emphasizes sorption media, with broad application to a myriad of contaminants—both geogenic and anthropogenic—keeping in mind that it is not enough for water to be potable, it must also be palatable.

Definitions of Art

In the last thirty years, work in analytic philosophy of art has flourished, and it has given rise to considerably controversy. Stephen Davies describes and analyzes the definition of art as it has been discussed in Anglo-American philosophy during this period and, in the process, introduces his own perspective on ways in which we should reorient our thinking.Davies conceives of the debate as revealing two basic, conflicting approaches—the functional and the procedural—to the questions of whether art can be defined, and if so, how. As the author sees it, the functionalist believes that an object is a work of art only if it performs a particular function (usually, that of providing a rewarding aesthetic experience). By contrast the proceduralist believes that something is an artwork only if it has been created according to certain rules and procedures. Davies attempts to demonstrate the fruitfulness of viewing the debate in terms of this framework, and he develops new arguments against both points of view—although he is more critical of functional than of procedural definitions.Because it has generated so much of the recent literature, Davies starts his analysis with a discussion of Morris Weitz's germinal paper, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics." He goes on to examine other important works by Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and Ben Tilghman and develops in his critiques original arguments on such matters of the artificiality of artworks and the relevance of artists' intentions.