The Quests continue Benjamin Harm is just trying to figure out his life after college when he returns home to clear out his childhood home. What he finds are more questions about his birth and adoption. Seeking answers, he stumbles onto the Protectors of the Land, who are quickly convinced Ben is the next person destined to travel to the Land. Despite balking at the concept of Interdimensional travel, Ben finds himself in the Land on a desperate quest to find the kidnapped Griffin cub. Going on a fantastical sea voyage to the mystical Barrier, Ben learns the value of nurture versus nature, destiny versus existing. His trek will bring him knowledge about his heritage, his unique capabilities and his impact on the Land. Join Ben as he embarks on a journey that will take him to the ends of the Land, and beyond.

A barrier to entailment exists if you can't get conclusions of a certain kind from premises of another. One of the most famous barriers in philosophy is Hume's Law, which says that you can't get normative conclusions from descriptive premises, or in slogan form: you can't get an ought from an is. This barrier is highly controversial, and many famous counterexamples were proposed in the last century. But there are other barriers which function almost as philosophical platitudes: no Universal conclusions from Particular premises, no Future conclusions from premises about the Past, and no claims that attribute Necessity from premises that merely tell us how things happen to be in the Actual world. Barriers to Entailment proposes a unified logical account of five barriers that have played important roles in philosophy, in the process showing how to diagnose proposed counterexamples and arguing that the case for Hume's Law is as strong as that for the platitudinous barriers. The first two parts of the book employ techniques from formal logic, but present them in an accessible way, suitable for any reader with some background in first-order model theory (of the kind that might be taught in a first class in logic). Gillian Russell introduces tense, modal, indexical, and deontic formal logics, but always avoids unneeded complexity. Each barrier is connected to broader philosophical topics: universality, time, necessity, context-sensitivity, and normativity. Russell brings out under-recognised connections between the domains and lays the groundwork for further work at the intersections. The last part of the book transposes the formal work to informal barrier theses in the philosophy of language, in the process doing new work on the concept of logical consequence, and providing new responses to proposed informal counterexamples to Hume's Law which employ hard-to-formalise tools from natural language, such as speech acts and thick normative expressions.

Focuses on the different methods that economic science has employed in order to detect and measure barriers to entry. This book presents a chronological analysis of competing Harvard and Chicago Schools' interpretations of this phenomenon.

China’s late-imperial history has been framed as a long coda of decline, played out during the Qing dynasty. Reappraising this narrative, Stephen Halsey traces the origins of China’s current great-power status to this so-called decadent era, when threats of war with European and Japanese empirestriggered innovative state-building and statecraft.

Freedom of information is a principle commonly associated with the United States’ First Amendment traditions or digital-era technology boosters. Barriers Down reveals its unexpected origins in political, economic, and cultural battles over analog media in the mid-twentieth century. Diana Lemberg traces how the United States shaped media around the world after 1945 under the banner of the “free flow of information,” showing how the push for global media access acted as a vehicle for American power. Barriers Down considers debates over civil liberties and censorship in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere alongside Americans’ efforts to circumvent foreign regulatory systems in the quest to expand markets and bring their ideas to new publics. Lemberg shows how in the decades following the Second World War American free-flow policies reshaped the world’s information landscape, though not always as intended. Through burgeoning information diplomacy and development aid, Washington diffused new media ranging from television and satellite broadcasting to global English. But these actions also spurred overseas actors to articulate alternative understandings of information freedom and of how information flows might be regulated. Bridging the historiographies of the United States in the world, human rights, decolonization and development, and media and technology, Barriers Down excavates the analog roots of digital-age debates over the politics and ethics of transnational information flows.

Sailor flees her home to avoid an attack by gang members. She stashes herself in the garage of her neighbor, Timi, who invents equipment at a military black site and who also tinkers in his garage. One of the gang members, Rocky, tails her into the garage, so Sailor takes her chances with Timi’s invisibility device still under development instead of facing the gang’s violence. Rather than become invisible, Sailor transports to a world, Notia, in another universe, but Rocky pursues her there. The ruler or caretaker for that territory, Slick, dips into the minds of all living creatures as easily as dipping a toe into water. Meanwhile, Timi supposes his device killed his neighbor, so he struggles with ironing out the final kinks in it while his boss, the colonel, schemes to get his hands on it. Sailor’s driving urge to return home pales with the possible military invasion of Notia by the colonel. Compounding that with the decimation of Earth as well leaves Sailor, Timi, and Slick as the only three to avert the destruction of two worlds. The story celebrates individualism and friendship. It also challenges the notion that striving toward a goal is the only way to reach it. As Slick says, “A better strategy sometimes is to escape what binds you to your particular rut, break through the barriers restraining you, so to speak, and then your paths to possibilities open up.”