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Making Sense Of Nonsense: The Logical Bridge Between Science And Spirituality
by Raymond MoodyWhat do the whimsical writings of Dr. Seuss have in common with near-death experiences? The answer is that nonsense writing and spiritual experiences seem to defy all logic and yet they both can make a powerful personal impact. In this book, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Raymond Moody shares the groundbreaking results of five decades of research into the philosophy of nonsense, revealing dynamic new perspectives on language, logic, and the mystical side of life. Explore the meaningful feelings that accompany nonsense language and learn how engaging with nonsense can help you on your own spiritual path. Discover how nonsense transcends classical logic, opening the doorway to new spiritual and philosophical breakthroughs. With dozens of examples from literature, comedy, music, and the history of religion, this book presents a unique new approach to the mysteries of the human spirit.
Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics
by Jean BricmontThis book explains, in simple terms, with a minimum of mathematics, why things can appear to be in two places at the same time, why correlations between simultaneous events occurring far apart cannot be explained by local mechanisms, and why, nevertheless, the quantum theory can be understood in terms of matter in motion. No need to worry, as some people do, whether a cat can be both dead and alive, whether the moon is there when nobody looks at it, or whether quantum systems need an observer to acquire definite properties. The author's inimitable and even humorous style makes the book a pleasure to read while bringing a new clarity to many of the longstanding puzzles of quantum physics.
Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spain
by Cornelia DeanCornelia Dean draws on her 30 years as a science journalist with the New York Times to expose the flawed reasoning and knowledge gaps that handicap readers when they try to make sense of science. She calls attention to conflicts of interest in research and the price society pays when science journalism declines and funding dries up.
Making Sense of Science: Understanding the Social Study of Science
by Steven Yearley`Fluid, readable and accessible ... I found the overall quality of the book to be excellent. It provides an overview of major (and preceding) developments in the field of science studies. It examines landmark works, authors, concepts and approaches ... I will certainly use this book as one of the course texts' Eileen Crist, Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society, Virginia Tech Science is at the heart of contemporary society and is therefore central to the social sciences. Yet science studies has often encountered resistance from social scientists. This book attempts to remedy this by giving the most extensive, thorough and best argued account of the field and explaining to social scientists why science matters to them. This is a landmark book that demystifies science studies and successfully bridges the divide between social theory and the sociology of science. Illustrated with relevant, illuminating examples, it provides the ideal guide to science studies and social theory.
Making Sense of Secondary Science: Research into children’s ideas
by Rosalind Driver Peter Rushworth Ann Squires Valerie Wood-RobinsonWhen children begin secondary school they already have knowledge and ideas about many aspects of the natural world from their experiences both in primary classes and outside school. These ideas, right or wrong, form the basis of all they subsequently learn. Research has shown that teaching is unlikely to be effective unless it takes into account the position from which the learner starts. Making Sense of Secondary Science provides a concise and accessible summary of the research that has been done internationally in this area. The research findings are arranged in three main sections: * life and living processes* materials and their properties* physical processes. Full bibliographies in each section allow interested readers to pursue the themes further. Much of this material has hitherto been available only in limited circulation specialist journals or in unpublished research. Its publication in this convenient form will be welcomed by all researchers in science education and by practicing science teachers continuing their professional development, who want to deepen their understanding of how their children think and learn.
Making Sense of Secondary Science: Research into children's ideas
by Rosalind Driver Peter Rushworth Ann Squires Valerie Wood-RobinsonWhat ideas do children hold about the natural world? How do these ideas affect their learning of science? Young learners bring to the classroom knowledge and ideas about many aspects of the natural world constructed from their experiences of education and from outside school. These ideas contribute to subsequent learning, and research has shown that teaching of science is unlikely to be effective unless it takes learners’ perspectives into account. Making Sense of Secondary Science provides a concise, accessible summary of international research into learners’ ideas about science, presenting evidence-based insight into the conceptions that learners hold, before and even despite teaching. With expert summaries from across the science domains, it covers research findings from life and living processes, materials and their properties and physical processes This classic text is essential reading for all trainee secondary, elementary and primary school science teachers, as well as those researching the science curriculum and science methods, who want to deepen their understanding of how learners think and to use these insights to inform teaching strategies. It also provides a baseline for researchers wishing to investigate contemporary influences on children’s ideas and to study the persistence of these conceptions. Both components of Making Sense of Secondary Science – this book and the accompanying teacher’s resource file, Making Sense of Secondary Science: Support materials for teachers - were developed as a result of a collaborative project between Leeds City Council Department of Education and the Children’s Learning in Science Research Group at the University of Leeds, UK.
Making Sense Of Sex: How Genes And Gender Influence Our Relationships
by David P. Barash Judith Eve LiptonWhy do most women prefer romance, and men, sex? Why do women live longer than men? Why are men willing to pay for sex while women almost never are? Why are women nearly always the primary caregivers of young children? What happens when a man's brain is trapped in a woman's body? When is a short, balding middle-aged man more attractive than a tall, handsome, young one? In Making Sense of Sex, the husband-and-wife team of David Barash, an evolutionary biologist, and Judith Lipton, a clinical psychiatrist, draw on their respective areas of expertise to explore and explain the central fact of our existence -- that men and women are fundamentally, unalterably different. They present an eye-opening and wide-ranging consideration of what those differences are, how they came to be, why they are important, and what they mean in our everyday lives. The authors integrate biological and anthropological findings with real-life stories of indviduals to address the conundrums that surround male-female behavior and relationships. Drawing on the latest research in evolutionary biology, they trace the multifaceted gender gap to the basic, defining difference between males and females: that one makes sperm, the other, eggs. They show how that distinction explains why women and men differ in essential ways, exploring such questions as: Why are men more attracted than women to pornography, group sex, and one-night stands? Why are women the "gatekeepers" of sex? Why do women have orgasms?Making Sense of Sex is a highly informative and entertaining look at human relationships. The book will help readers not only to better understand themselves, but to better understand their children, their relatives, and their lovers with whom they share so much yet find so infuriatingly and fascinatingly different.
Making Sense of Statistical Mechanics (Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics)
by Jean BricmontMany people, including physicists, are confused about what the Second Law of thermodynamics really means, about how it relates to the arrow of time, and about whether it can be derived from classical mechanics. They also wonder what entropy really is: Is it all about information? But, if so, then, what is its relation to fluxes of heat?One might ask similar questions about probabilities: Do they express subjective judgments by us, humans, or do they reflect facts about the world, i.e. frequencies. And what notion of probability is used in the natural sciences, in particular statistical mechanics?This book addresses all of these questions in the clear and pedagogical style for which the author is known. Although valuable as accompaniment to an undergraduate course on statistical mechanics or thermodynamics, it is not a standard course book. Instead it addresses both the essentials and the many subtle questions that are usually brushed under the carpet in such courses. As one of the most lucid accounts of the above questions, it provides enlightening reading for all those seeking answers, including students, lecturers, researchers and philosophers of science.
Making Sense of the Secular: Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia (Routledge Studies in Religion #24)
by Ranjan GhoshThis book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today – its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism – and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies. Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and China’s encounters with religion, secularism, and modernization provides incisive and broader perspectives on how we negotiate secularism within the contemporary threats of terrorism and other forms of fundamentalism and state-politics. However, amidst the discussions of various versions of secularism in different countries and cultural contexts, this book also raises several other issues relevant to the antitheocratic and theocratic alike, such as: Is secularism is merely a nonreligious establishment? Is secularism a kind of cultural war? How is it related to "terror"? The book at once makes sense of secularism across cultural, religious, and national borders and puts several relevant issues on the anvil for further investigations and understanding.
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
by Thomas LaqueurThis is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur’s story—the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm—but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe. <P><P> Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman’s orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two “masterplots” emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud’s famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice. <P><P> This is a powerful story, written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought, whether argument or surprised agreement, in a wide range of readers.
Making Simple Robots
by Kathy CeceriMaking Simple Robots is based on one idea: Anybody can build a robot! That includes kids, English majors, school teachers, and grandparents. If you can knit, sew, or fold a flat piece of paper into a box, you can build a no-tech robotic part. If you can use a hot glue gun, you can learn to solder basic electronics into a low-tech robot that reacts to its environment. And if you can figure out how to use the apps on your smart phone, you can learn enough programming to communicate with a simple robot.Written in language that non-engineers can understand, Making Simple Robots helps beginners move beyond basic craft skills and materials to the latest products and tools being used by artists and inventors. Find out how to animate folded paper origami, design a versatile robot wheel-leg for 3D printing, or program a rag doll to blink its cyborg eye. Each project includes step-by-step directions as well as clear diagrams and photographs. And every chapter offers suggestions for modifying and expanding the projects, so that you can return to the projects again and again as your skill set grows.
Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are
by Jennifer M. GrohKnowing where things are seems effortless. Yet our brains devote tremendous power to figuring out simple details about spatial relationships. Jennifer Groh traces this mental detective work to show how the brain creates our sense of location, and makes the case that the brain's systems for thinking about space may be the systems of thought itself.
Making Starships and Stargates
by James F. WoodwardTo create the exotic materials and technologies needed to make stargates and warp drives is the holy grail of advanced propulsion. A less ambitious, but nonetheless revolutionary, goal is finding a way to accelerate a spaceship without having to lug along a gargantuan reservoir of fuel that you blow out a tailpipe. Tethers and solar sails are conventional realizations of the basic idea. There may now be a way to achieve these lofty objectives. "Making Starships and Stargates" will have three parts. The first will deal with information about the theories of relativity needed to understand the predictions of the effects that make possible the "propulsion" techniques, and an explanation of those techniques. The second will deal with experimental investigations into the feasibility of the predicted effects; that is, do the effects exist and can they be applied to propulsion? The third part of the book - the most speculative - will examine the question: what physics is needed if we are to make wormholes and warp drives? Is such physics plausible? And how might we go about actually building such devices? This book pulls all of that material together from various sources, updates and revises it, and presents it in a coherent form so that those interested will be able to find everything of relevance all in one place.
Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories
Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories opens up new and exciting perspectives on how systems of state surveillance developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking a transnational approach, the book challenges us to rethink the presumed novelty of contemporary surveillance practices, while developing critical analyses of the ways in which state surveillance has profoundly shaped the emergence of contemporary societies. Contributors engage with a range of surveillance practices, including medical and disease surveillance, systems of documentation and identification, and policing and security. These approaches enable us to understand how surveillance has underpinned the emergence of modern states; sustained systems of state security; enabled practices of colonial rule; perpetuated racist and gendered forms of identification and classification; regulated and policed migration; shaped the eugenically inflected medicalization of disability and sexuality; and contained dissent. While surveillance is thus bound up with complex relations of power, it is also contested. Emerging from the book is a sense of how state actors understood and legitimized their own surveillance practices, as well as how these practices have been implemented in different times and places. At the same time, contributors explore the myriad ways in which these systems of surveillance have been resisted, challenged, and subverted.
Making Sustainability Measurable: A Practical Book for Sustainable Living and Working
by Michael WühleMaking something measurable means being able to control it Sustainability is a term with a wealth of meanings and many possible misinterpretations. Yet sustainability can be a powerful and effective tool to guide our practical actions and simplify complicated decisions. Sustainability can save costs and stabilize any organization and company. It protects the climate and the environment and leads all people into a good future. The non-fiction book "Making Sustainability Measurable" is a practical guide on how methods and instruments of sustainability can be used successfully - be it in professional life or in private and voluntary engagement. The book not only provides the interested layperson with a comprehensive overview of the central aspects of sustainability management, it also offers practitioners important decision-making aids and tips for implementation. The easy-to-understand style conveys all the essential contents of the topic of sustainability even to newcomers. Whether you have previous knowledge or not - with the many immediately implementable "best practices", the book offers a lot of practical application possibilities. The appendices contain unrestricted tools from the author's practice for the introduction of successful sustainability management.
Making the Connections: A How-To Guide for Organic Chemistry Lab Techniques
by Anne B. PadiasThe title of the book refers to the making of bonds to build the molecules that are an essential part of organic chemistry. The book is a user-friendly instructional tool designed to facilitate the learning process by including many every-day examples of the chemical principles used in the laboratory.
Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality
by Michael MontoyaThis innovative ethnographic study animates the racial politics that underlie genomic research into type 2 diabetes, one of the most widespread chronic diseases and one that affects ethnic groups disproportionately. Michael J. Montoya follows blood donations from "Mexican-American" donors to laboratories that are searching out genetic contributions to diabetes. His analysis lays bare the politics and ethics of the research process, addressing the implicit contradiction of undertaking genetic research that reinscribes race's importance even as it is being demonstrated to have little scientific validity. In placing DNA sampling, processing, data set sharing, and carefully crafted science into a broader social context, Making the Mexican Diabetic underscores the implications of geneticizing disease while illuminating the significance of type 2 diabetes research in American life.
Making the Most of the Anthropocene: Facing the Future
by Mark DennyHumans have changed the Earth so profoundly that we’ve ushered in the first new geologic period since the ice ages. So, what are we going to do about it?Ever since Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term "Anthropocene" to describe our current era—one in which human impact on the environment has pushed Earth into an entirely new geological epoch—arguments for and against the new designation have been raging. Finally, an official working group of scientists was created to determine once and for all whether we humans have tossed one too many plastic bottles out the car window and wrought a change so profound as to be on par with the end of the last ice age. In summer 2016, the answer came back: Yes. In Making the Most of the Anthropocene, scientist Mark Denny tackles this hard truth head-on and considers burning questions: How did we reach our present technological and ecological state? How are we going to cope with our uncertain future? Will we come out of this, or are we doomed as a species? Is there anything we can do about what happens next? This book• explains what the Anthropocene is and why it is important• offers suggestions for minimizing harm instead of fretting about an impending environmental apocalypse • combines easy-to-grasp scientific, technological, economic, and anthropological analyses In Making the Most of the Anthopocene, there are no equations, no graphs, and no impenetrable jargon. Instead, you'll find a fascinating cast of characters, including journalists from outer space, peppered moths, and unjustly maligned Polynesians. In his bright, lively voice, Denny envisions a future that balances reaction and reason, one in which humanity emerges bloody but unbowed—and in which those of us who are prepared can make the most of the Anthropocene.
Making the Most of the Postdoc: Strategically Advancing Your Early Career
by James GouldGraduate students and postdoctoral fellows spend upwards of 15 years honing their research skills. However, in all this training, compulsory career and professional development courses are far and few between. In the absence of a formal training curriculum, this co-curricular postdoc guidebook can be used as a manual for aspiring scientists to find career success. Postdocs face many hurdles in their pursuit of research excellence and independence. None more frustrating than making the most of this challenging yet rewarding opportunity. Ultimately, the point of postdoc training is not maintaining a lengthy postdoc tenure but landing a satisfying job. Regardless of what they do in their career, postdocs need to gain and master many skills both directly related to their scientific training and beyond. This book posits that if trainees are motivated and given some practical guidance, they can build a professional reputation while achieving a successful postdoc experience. Based on the personal experiences of the author, this book logically outlines the flow of the postdoc experience from beginning to end by providing actionable advice on how to get the most out of postdoctoral training while laying out strategies for choosing the right research environment to thrive along with planning, and executing, a successful postdoc tenure. Written for current and future postdocs, as well as their mentors, this book covers what they need know, and do, to strategically advance in their early research career. Key Features: Practical and actionable advice from an author that has experienced PhD and postdoc training, and is now directing a postdoc office at a world-renowned research institution Methodical approach most readers can readily adapt for their own purposes Specifically written for current and future STEM postdocs while being agnostic of the research field Dr. James Gould, PhD is Director of the HMS/HSDM Office for Postdoctoral Fellows at Harvard Medical School (HMS) where he has implemented research, career, and professional development programs and policies forHMS-affiliated trainees since 2011. Prior to HMS, Dr. Gould completed two postdoc fellowships at the National Cancer Institute of the NIH where he became involved in training affairs and studied cancer metabolism. Dr.Gould received his BS in Biotechnology/Molecular Biology from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in Biochemistry and MolecularBiology from the University of Louisville.
Making the Rural Urban: Inter-Class Dynamics to Protect the Environment in a Gentrifying Rural Town in Colombia (Latin American Societies)
by Sebastián Felipe Villamizar-SantamaríaThis book takes the small rural town of La Calera, in the outskirts of the Colombian capital of Bogotá, as a case study to analyze how residents from different social classes – wealthier ex-urban newcomers arriving to traditionally peasant and rural areas – interact to decide how nature will be used in the face of further urban expansion. Contrary to the conflicts in other gentrification cases, including those of “green” gentrification, this book shows how newcomers and longtimers in La Calera use environmental concerns to bridge social class rifts and push the state to provide water, public space, and decision-making power. Residents see abundant ecological resources like water and land around them, but they do not have access to aqueducts, green public space or power over planning decisions affecting the distribution of these resources. As a response, and to challenge the state more effectively, newcomers and longtimers create inter-class alliances through what the author calls third nature: the way residents try to both protect and keep using existing ecological goods. To do so, despite high levels of class inequality, residents had a similar goal of protecting ecological resources around them by intervening in the physical and political landscapes against a state that induces scarcity, selectively enforcing environmental policies to the detriment of Calerunos. As cities all around the Global South continue to grow, urban expansion posits a threat to the environment by transforming agricultural and protected areas into denser residential or touristic spaces. Moreover, as natural resources become scarcer in the face of climate change, inequality might further existing environmental privileges and vulnerabilities. By examining closely how Calerunos bridge class inequalities for environmental reasons, this case highlights processes that inform other gentrifying rural spaces around the world.
Making the Soldier Decisive on Future Battlefields
by Division On Engineering Physical SciencesThe U. S. military does not believe its soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines should be engaged in combat with adversaries on a "level playing field. " Our combat individuals enter engagements to win. To that end, the United States has used its technical prowess and industrial capability to develop decisive weapons that overmatch those of potential enemies. In its current engagement--what has been identified as an "era of persistent conflict"-- the nation's most important weapon is the dismounted soldier operating in small units. Today's soldier must be prepared to contend with both regular and irregular adversaries. Results in Iraq and Afghanistan show that, while the U. S. soldier is a formidable fighter, the contemporary suite of equipment and support does not afford the same high degree of overmatch capability exhibited by large weapons platforms--yet it is the soldier who ultimately will play the decisive role in restoring stability. Making the Soldier Decisive on Future Battlefields establishes the technical requirements for overmatch capability for dismounted soldiers operating individually or in small units. It prescribes technological and organizational capabilities needed to make the dismounted soldier a decisive weapon in a changing, uncertain, and complex future environment and provides the Army with 15 recommendations on how to focus its efforts to enable the soldier and tactical small unit (TSU) to achieve overmatch.
Making the Sustainable University: Trials and Tribulations (Education for Sustainability)
by Katie Leone Simeon Komisar Edwin M. Everham IIIThis book documents strategies for universities engaging sustainability challenges through the education of global citizens on topics such as climate change, habitat alteration, species loss, resource depletion and contamination, food access and sovereignty, economic equity, and energy use. Different disciplines and operational units often have disparate ideas in mind when they work toward advancing sustainability. For example, some disciplines focus on environmental challenges (identifying impacts to ecosystems, mitigation and remediation strategies), some on greening of industrial and commercial practices while others address social equity—often there is little effort to connect these pieces especially while considering economic impacts. This book examines how Florida Gulf Coast University has attempted to infuse sustainability across curricula and operations as an integrated concept and our successes and shortcomings are instructional for sustainability practitioners on college campuses and other industries in a wide audience.
Making Things Happen: A Theory Of Causal Explanation
by James WoodwardWoodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.
Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)
by Yulia FrumerWhat is time made of? We might balk at such a question, and reply that time is not made of anything—it is an abstract and universal phenomenon. In Making Time, Yulia Frumer upends this assumption, using changes in the conceptualization of time in Japan to show that humans perceive time as constructed and concrete. In the mid-sixteenth century, when the first mechanical clocks arrived in Japan from Europe, the Japanese found them interesting but useless, because they failed to display time in units that changed their length with the seasons, as was customary in Japan at the time. In 1873, however, the Japanese government adopted the Western equal-hour system as well as Western clocks. Given that Japan carried out this reform during a period of rapid industrial development, it would be easy to assume that time consciousness is inherent to the equal-hour system and a modern lifestyle, but Making Time suggests that punctuality and time-consciousness are equally possible in a society regulated by a variable-hour system, arguing that this reform occurred because the equal-hour system better reflected a new conception of time — as abstract and universal—which had been developed in Japan by a narrow circle of astronomers, who began seeing time differently as a result of their measurement and calculation practices. Over the course of a few short decades this new way of conceptualizing time spread, gradually becoming the only recognized way of treating time.
Making Time on Mars (Inside Technology)
by Zara MirmalekAn examination of how the daily work of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers was organized across three sites on two planets using local Mars time.In 2004, mission scientists and engineers working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) remotely operated two robots at different sites on Mars for ninety consecutive days. An unusual feature of this successful mission was that it operated on Mars time—the daily work was organized across three sites on two planets according to two Martian time zones. In Making Time on Mars, Zara Mirmalek shows that this involved more than a resetting of wristwatches; the team's struggle to synchronize with Mars time involved technological and communication breakdowns, informal workarounds, and extra work to support the technology that was intended to support people. Her account of how NASA created an entirely new temporality for the MER mission offers insights about the assumptions behind the organizational relationship between clock time and work.Mirmalek, herself a member of the mission team, offers an insider's view of the MER workplace and community. She describes the discord among MER's multiple temporalities and examines issues of professional identity that helped shape the experience of working according to Mars time. Considering time and work relationships through a multidisciplinary lens, Mirmalek shows how contemporary and historical human–technology relationships inform assumptions about the unalterability of clock time. She argues that the organizational connection between clock time and work, although still operational, is outdated.