In 1998, a National Academy of Sciences panel called for an integrated, risk-based food safety system. This goal is widely embraced, but there has been little advance in thinking about how to integrate knowledge about food safety risks into a system- wide risk analysis framework. Such a framework is the essential scientific basis for better priority setting and resource allocation to improve food safety. Sandra Hoffmann and Michael Taylor bring together leading scientists, risk analysts, and economists, as well as experienced regulators and policy analysts, to better define the priority setting problem and focus on the scientific and intellectual resources available to construct a risk analysis framework for improving food safety. Toward Safer Food provides a common starting point for discussions about how to construct this framework. The book includes a multi-disciplinary introduction to the existing data, research, and methodological and conceptual approaches on which a system-wide risk analysis framework must draw. It also recognizes that efforts to improve food safety will be influenced by the current institutional context, and provides an overview of the ways in which food safety law and administration affect priority setting. Hoffman and Taylor intend their book to be accessible to people from a wide variety of backgrounds. At the same time, they retain the core conceptual sophistication needed to understand the challenges that are inherent in improving food safety. The editors hope that this book will help the U.S. move beyond a call for an integrated, risk-based system toward its actual construction.

In his early thirties, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) convinced everyone that he had abandoned making art in favor of playing chess. But from 1946 to 1966, he was secretly at work in his studio on West 14th Street in New York City. There he produced his final masterpiece: Étant donnés: 1o la chute d'eau, 2o le gaz d'élairage, composed of a battered wood door through which one views a prone, nude female, holding aloft an antique gas lamp against a landscape of trees, waterfall, and sky. Unveiled as a permanent installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in July 1969, the year after Duchamp's death, it startled the art world with its explicit eroticism and voyeurism, as well as its trompe l'oeil realism. Since its public debut, Étant donnés has been recognized as one of the most important and enigmatic works of the 20th century. Published to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the original installation of Étant donnés and to accompany the first major exhibition on the artwork and its studies, this richly illustrated book presents a wealth of new research and documents that draw upon previously unpublished works of art and materials. The catalogue also examines the critical and artistic reception of Étant donnés, as evidenced by the subsequent work of Les Levine, Hannah Wilke, Robert Gober, Marcel Dzama, Ray Johnson, and other artists who have engaged with Duchamp's provocative and challenging tableau-construction.

With The Great Hidden Inspirer, the fourth volume in the Poiesis series, the renowned Duchamp researcher Michael R. Taylor investigates the role of Duchamp as the "secret mastermind" at decisive moments in art history. In his eponymous essay, "The Great Hidden Inspirer," Taylor reveals that it was Duchamp who, while in exile in New York between 1942 and 1947, helped Surrealism out of its crisis and gave the movement a new direction. The volume celebrates the 100th anniversary of what is probably Duchamp's most provocative stroke of genius, Fountain, and contains another one of Taylor's essays, "Blind Man's Bluff," which describes the backstory of how the urinal shook the art world. The attempts at the time to classify this provocative object are evidence of the difficulties its critics faced at the start of the 20th century as they sought to free themselves from traditional aesthetic concepts.

Thomas Chimes (b. 1921) is one of Philadelphia's most important living artists. Tracing the stylistic evolution of Chimes's idiosyncratic art, this handsome book presents a long-overdue survey of his remarkable five-decade career: canvases combining landscape imagery with symbols such as crucifixes (late 1950s-60s); mixed-media constructions set within finely crafted metal boxes (late 1960s-early 1970s); his best-known works, a series of 48 intimate sepia-toned panel portraits of 19th- and 20th-century writers and artists that are placed within oversized wood frames (1973-78); and the enigmatic "white paintings" of the past two decades. The book reveals how Chimes has found inspiration in the writings of Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, and especially Alfred Jarry, the iconoclastic playwright and novelist whose invented "'Pataphysics"--the "science of imaginary solutions"--has provided the artist with a seemingly inexhaustible font of imagery. Taylor explores the links between Chimes's work and that of contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, and Nancy Spero, as well as important predecessors like Vincent van Gogh, Marcel Duchamp, and fellow Philadelphian Thomas Eakins. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art (February 27 - May 6, 2007)

Vietnam, America’s anguish. As the nation’s Baby Boomers grew into maturity mid-century the nation and the world was undergoing dramatic changes. The end of the Eisenhower Era brought about Kennedy’s Camelot, the resurgence of the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and tragedies of the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations. As the Cold War dragged on and China Opened the threat of World Communist domination and the Domino Theory engulfed America in conflicts in the Caribbean, Latin America, Angola, Berlin, Prague, and Southeast Asia. From a small detachment of military advisors in 1962, the United States commitment to the Federal Republic of South Vietnam grew to over 500,000 troops by the end of the Sixties. Failure to secure a quick victory brought about demands for increased resources and manpower. Dissatisfaction with the war lead to anti-war protests, Draft avoidance and eventually to the horrific events at Kent State. From 1962 until 1975 over 3,400,000 served in the Vietnam Conflict with over 58,000 dying in battle and more than 11,000 succumbing to non-combat related incidents. The experiences the veterans had in Vietnam came home with them and dramatically changed the nation even to this day. On Dixie Station is about the experiences three young naval officers had while in-country. All three were in their early twenties, just graduated from college and experiencing military life, one as investigator for the Navy’s Investigative Service in Da Nang and the other two as young officers serving on a destroyer in the South China Sea. Each of them and their peers face challenges they never envisioned happening to them. It’s a story of personal growth, tragedy, danger, and discovery. It involves battles, horrific crimes, and coming of age. It’s a dramatic picture of life in a war zone. About the Author Michael R. Taylor has degrees in International Relations, Public Administration, and Central & Eastern European Studies. He did post-graduate work in Environmental Planning and attended the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, NY in 1967-68. He has worked as a Municipal Manager, Environmental Project Manager, Construction Executive, Association Executive, and Magazine Publisher and Editor. He was the Principal Writer of the National Demolition Association’s Demolition Safety Manual which became the bible for safe work practice for the Demolition Industry around the world. He lives with his wife, Nancy in Doylestown, PA and Vero Beach, FL.

Mit The Great Hidden Inspirer, dem vierten Band der Poiesis-Reihe, widmet sich der renommierte Duchamp-Forscher Michael R. Taylor der Rolle Marcel Duchamps als heimlichem Drahtzieher in entscheidenden Momenten der Kunstgeschichte. In dem titelgebenden Aufsatz deckt Taylor auf, dass es Duchamp war, der dem Surrealismus in seinem New Yorker Exil zwischen 1942 und 1947 aus der Krise half und der Bewegung eine neue Richtung gab. Anlässlich des 100-jährigen Jubiläums von Duchamps wohl provokantestem Geniestreich Fountain erscheint ein weiterer Essay von Taylor in diesem Band. »Blind Man's Bluff« beschreibt die Hintergründe des Ereignisses, bei dem ein Pissoir die Kunstwelt erschütterte. Die damaligen Versuche, dieses provokante Objekt einzuordnen, zeugen von den Schwierigkeiten seiner Kritiker zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, sich von tradierten ästhetischen Vorstellungen zu lösen. MARCEL DUCHAMP, eigentlich Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), zählt zu den Wegbereitern des Dadaismus und Surrealismus. Seine Ansichten stellen den gängigen Kunstbegriff radikal in Frage und führten das Readymade in die Kunstwelt ein.

An understanding of scale and scaling effects is of central importance to a scientific understanding of the world. With Extreme Science, help middle and high school biology, Earth science, chemistry, physics, and math students develop quantitative evaluation. Comprehending scale at the largest and smallest levels is where a quantitative understanding of the world begins.

De Chirico's mysterious paintings had a profound influence on modern art but one key to understanding them is an early series of eight paintings on the mythical Greek princess Ariadne. This volume provides an overall account of De Chirico's career.