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Conversations with Andre Dubus (Literary Conversations Series)
by Olivia Carr EdenfieldOver three decades, celebrated fiction writer Andre Dubus (1936–1999) published seven collections of short stories, two collections of essays, two collections of previously published stories, two novels, and a novella. While this is an impressive publishing record for any writer, for Dubus, who suffered a near-fatal accident mid-career, it is near miraculous. Just after midnight on July 23, 1986, after stopping to assist two stranded motorists, Dubus was struck by a car. His right leg was crushed, and his left leg had to be amputated above the knee. After months of hospital stays and surgeries, he would suffer chronic pain for the rest of his life. However, when he gave his first interview after the accident, his deepest fear was that he would never write again. This collection of interviews traces his career beginning in 1967 with the publication of his novel The Lieutenant, to his final interview given right before his death February 24, 1999. In between are conversations that focus on his shift to essay writing during his long recovery period as well as those that celebrate his return to fiction with the publication of “The Colonel's Wife,” in 1993. Dubus would also share stories surrounding his Louisiana childhood, his three marriages, the writers who influenced him, and his deep Catholic faith.
Brian De Palma's Split-Screen: A Life in Film
by Douglas KeeseyOver the last five decades, the films of director Brian De Palma (b. 1940) have been among the biggest successes (The Untouchables; Mission: Impossible) and the most high-profile failures (The Bonfire of the Vanities) in Hollywood history. De Palma helped launch the careers of such prominent actors as Robert De Niro, John Travolta, and Sissy Spacek (who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress in Carrie). Indeed, Quentin Tarantino named Blow Out as one of his top three favorite films, praising De Palma as the best living American director. Picketed by feminists protesting its depictions of violence against women, Dressed to Kill helped to create the erotic thriller genre. Scarface, with its over-the-top performance by Al Pacino, remains a cult favorite. In the twenty-first century, De Palma has continued to experiment, incorporating elements from videogames (Femme Fatale), tabloid journalism (The Black Dahlia), YouTube, and Skype (Redacted and Passion) into his latest works. What makes De Palma such a maverick even when he is making Hollywood genre films? Why do his movies often feature megalomaniacs and failed heroes? Is he merely a misogynist and an imitator of Alfred Hitchcock? To answer these questions, author Douglas Keesey takes a biographical approach to De Palma's cinema, showing how De Palma reworks events from his own life into his films. Written in an accessible style and including a chapter on every one of his films to date, this book is for anyone who wants to know more about De Palma's controversial films or who wants to better understand the man who made them.
Introduction to Digital Navigation: Including Fundamentals of Navigation (Springer Series on Naval Architecture, Marine Engineering, Shipbuilding and Shipping #16)
by Alexander Arnfinn OlsenThis book focuses on Coastal and Ocean Navigation with an emphasis on digital navigation (using ECDIS) and would be useful to both experienced seafarers as an aide memoire, and also to cadets and trainees embarking on their maritime careers.The text has been developed for modern day ship’s navigator in the ‘digital era’. It is written from the perspective that the reader’s vessel will be navigated using an IMO type-approved electronic chart and display information system (ECDIS) as opposed to traditional chart-based passage planning. As such, the book focuses on the main principles associated with position and direction of the earth's surface, geodesy projects and grids, digital navigation, electronic chart and data information systems, fixing, internal aids to navigation and systems, external aids to navigation, tides and currents, ocean navigation, coastal navigation, pilotage and blind pilotage, anchoring, navigational errors, relative velocity, and bridge organisation and management.
Korteweg–de Vries Flows with General Initial Conditions (Mathematical Physics Studies)
by Shinichi KotaniLarge numbers of studies of the KdV equation have appeared since the pioneering paper by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, and Miura in 1967. Most of those works have employed the inverse spectral method for 1D Schrödinger operators or an advanced Fourier analysis. Although algebraic approaches have been discovered by Hirota–Sato and Marchenko independently, those have not been fully investigated and analyzed. The present book offers a new approach to the study of the KdV equation, which treats decaying initial data and oscillating data in a unified manner. The author’s method is to represent the tau functions introduced by Hirota–Sato and developed by Segal–Wilson later in terms of the Weyl–Titchmarsh functions (WT functions, in short) for the underlying Schrödinger operators. The main result is stated by a class of WT functions satisfying some of the asymptotic behavior along a curve approaching the spectrum of the Schrödinger operators at +∞ in an order of -(n-1/2)for the nth KdV equation. This class contains many oscillating potentials (initial data) as well as decaying ones. Especially bounded smooth ergodic potentials are included, and under certain conditions on the potentials, the associated Schrödinger operators have dense point spectrum. This provides a mathematical foundation for the study of the soliton turbulence problem initiated by Zakharov, which was the author’s motivation for extending the class of initial data in this book. A large class of almost periodic potentials is also included in these ergodic potentials. P. Deift has conjectured that any solutions to the KdV equation starting from nearly periodic initial data are almost periodic in time. Therefore, our result yields a foundation for this conjecture. For the reader’s benefit, the author has included here (1) a basic knowledge of direct and inverse spectral problem for 1D Schrödinger operators, including the notion of the WT functions; (2)Sato’s Grassmann manifold method revised by Segal–Wilson; and (3) basic results of ergodic Schrödinger operators.
Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-First-Century Approaches
by Mae Miller Claxton and Julia EichelbergerContributions by Jacob Agner, Sharon Deykin Baris, Carolyn J. Brown, Lee Anne Bryan, Keith Cartwright, Stuart Christie, Mae Miller Claxton, Virginia Ottley Craighill, David A. Davis, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Kevin Eyster, Dolores Flores-Silva, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Dawn Gilchrist, Rebecca L. Harrison, Casey Kayser, Michael Kreyling, Ebony Lumumba, Suzanne Marrs, Pearl Amelia McHaney, David McWhirter, Laura Sloan Patterson, Harriet Pollack, Gary Richards, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, Alec Valentine, Adrienne Akins Warfield, Keri Watson, and Amy WeldonToo often Eudora Welty is known to the general public as Miss Welty, a "perfect lady" who wrote affectionate portraits of her home region. Yet recent scholarship has amply demonstrated a richer complexity. Welty was an innovative artist with cosmopolitan sensibilities and progressive politics, a woman who maintained close friendships with artists and intellectuals throughout the world, a writer as unafraid to experiment as she was to level her pen at the worst human foibles.The essays collected in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty seek to move Welty beyond a discussion of region and reflect new scholarship that remaps her work onto a larger canvas. The book offers ways to help twenty-first-century readers navigate Welty's challenging and intricate narratives. It provides answers to questions many teachers will have: Why should I study a writer who documents white privilege? Why should I give this "regional" writer space on an already crowded syllabus? Why should I teach Welty if I do not study the South? How can I help my students make sense of her modernist narratives? How can Welty's texts help me teach my students about literary theory, about gender and disability, about cultures and societies with which my students are unfamiliar?
Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century (American Made Music Series)
by Nina Goss and Eric HoffmanContributions by Alberto Brodesco, James Cody, Andrea Cossu, Anne Margaret Daniel, Jesper Doolard, Nina Goss, Jonathan Hodgers, Jamie Lorentzen, Fahri Öz, Nick Smart, and Thad Williamson Bob Dylan is many things to many people. Folk prodigy. Rock poet. Quiet gentleman. Dionysian impresario. Cotton Mather. Stage hog. Each of these Dylan creations comes with its own accessories, including a costume, a hairstyle, a voice, a lyrical register, a metaphysics, an audience, and a library of commentary. Each Bob Dylan joins a collective cast that has made up his persona for over fifty years. No version of Dylan turns out uncomplicated, but the postmillennial manifestation seems peculiarly contrary—a tireless and enterprising antiquarian; a creator of singular texts and sounds through promiscuous poaching; an artist of innovation and uncanny renewal. This is a Dylan of persistent surrender from and engagement with a world he perceives as broken and enduring, addressing us from a past that is lost and yet forever present. Tearing the World Apart participates in the creation of the postmillennial Bob Dylan by exploring three central records of the twenty-first century—“Love and Theft” (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest (2012)—along with the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan helped write and in which he appears as an actor and musical performer. The collection of essays does justice to this difficult Bob Dylan by examining his method and effects through a disparate set of viewpoints. Readers will find a variety of critical contexts and cultural perspectives as well as a range of experiences as members of Dylan's audience. The essays in Tearing the World Apart illuminate, as a prism might, their intransigent subject from enticing and intersecting angles.
He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time (American Made Music Series)
by Jack IsenhourWhen George Jones recorded “He Stopped Loving Her Today” more than thirty years ago, he was a walking disaster. Twin addictions to drugs and alcohol had him drinking Jim Beam by the case and snorting cocaine as long as he was awake. Before it was over, Jones would be bankrupt, homeless, and an unwilling patient at an Alabama mental institution. In the midst of all this chaos, legendary producer Billy Sherrill—the man who discovered Tammy Wynette and cowrote “Stand by Your Man”—would somehow coax the performance of a lifetime out of the mercurial Jones. The result was a country masterpiece. He Stopped Loving Her Today, the story behind the making of the song often voted the best country song ever by both critics and fans, offers an overview of country music's origins and a search for the music's elusive Holy Grail: authenticity. The schizoid bottom line—even though country music is undeniably a branch of the make-believe world of showbiz, to fans and scholars alike, authenticity remains the ultimate measure of the music's power.
Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn
by S. Frederick StarrLafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) prowled the streets of New Orleans from 1877 to 1888 before moving on to a new life and global fame as a chronicler of Japan. Hearn's influence on our perceptions of New Orleans, however, has unjustly remained unknown. In ten years of serving as a correspondent and selling his writing in such periodicals as the New Orleans Daily Item, Times-Democrat, Harper's Weekly, and Scribner's Magazine he crystallized the way Americans view New Orleans and its south Louisiana environs. Hearn was prolific, producing colorful and vivid sketches, vignettes, news articles, essays, translations of French and Spanish literature, book reviews, short stories, and woodblock prints. He haunted the French Quarter to cover such events as the death of Marie Laveau. His descriptions of the seamy side of New Orleans, tainted with voodoo, debauchery, and mystery made a lasting impression on the nation. Denizens of the Crescent City and devotees who flock there for escapades and pleasures will recognize these original tales of corruption, of decay and benign frivolity, and of endless partying. With his writing, Hearn virtually invented the national image of New Orleans as a kind of alternative reality to the United States as a whole. S. Frederick Starr, a leading authority on New Orleans and Louisiana culture, edits the volume, adding an introduction that places Hearn in a social, historical, and literary context. Hearn was sensitive to the unique cultural milieu of New Orleans and Louisiana. During the decade that he spent in New Orleans, Hearn collected songs for the well-known New York music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel and extensively studied Creole French, making valuable and lasting contributions to ethnomusicology and linguistics. Hearn's writings on Japan are famous and have long been available. But Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn brings together a selection of Hearn's nonfiction on New Orleans and Louisiana, creating a previously unavailable sampling. In these pieces Hearn, an Anglo-Greek immigrant who came to America by way of Ireland, is alternately playful, lyrical, and morbid. This gathering also features ten newly discovered sketches. Using his broad stylistic palette, Hearn conjures up a lost New Orleans which later writers such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams used to evoke the city as both reality and symbol.
A Special Relationship: Britain Comes to Hollywood and Hollywood Comes to Britain
by Anthony SlideA Special Relationship provides not only a historical overview of the British in Hollywood, but also a detailed study of the contributions made by American individuals and companies to British cinema from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. The story begins with Ohio-born Charles Urban who came to London in 1898 and deserves credit for major involvement in the creation of a British film industry. While Ireland was still a part of Britain, the New York-based Kalem Company made films there from 1910 to 1913. British producers realized the importance of American stars, and many actors, beginning with Florence Turner (who was arguably also the first American star), made numerous British films. In the 1920s, such Hollywood stars as Mae Marsh, Betty Blythe, and Dorothy Gish remained active in Britain. In the 1930s, as their careers came to a halt, more than one hundred former American stars made the trip to England, partly as a vacation and partly in the hope of reenergizing their careers.Chapters discuss American cinematographers at work in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s and the introduction of Technicolor to British films. Diversity is represented by African American performers (most notably Paul Robeson), the Chinese American star Anna May Wong, along with female filmmakers from Hollywood. With Britain's declaration of war on Germany, there were Americans who stayed, such as Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon, contributing to the war effort. America became actively involved in British cinema after World War II, with many Hollywood studios producing films there. As the years progressed, the British film industry became an international film industry. The book concludes with the Harry Potter and James Bond series, indicative of a new international cinema, with financing and behind-the-camera talent coming from the United States, but with British locales and British stars.
Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (American Made Music Series)
by Lynn Abbott Doug SeroffThe commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. “Coon songs,” with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and jazz. In Ragged but Right, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the “big shows,” the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from “coon shouters” to “blues singers.” Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of blues and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot and Silas Green from New Orleans provided blues and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.
Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems: 4th International Conference, DDDAS 2022, Cambridge, MA, USA, October 6–10, 2022, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #13984)
by Erik Blasch Frederica Darema Alex AvedThis book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems, DDDAS 2022, which took place in Cambridge, MA, USA, during October 6–10, 2022.The 31 regular papers in the main track and 5 regular papers from the Wildfires panel, as well as one workshop paper, were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They were organized in following topical sections: DDAS2022 Main-Track Plenary Presentations; Keynotes; DDDAS2022 Main-Track: Wildfires Panel; Workshop on Climate, Life, Earth, Planets.
Chris Ware: Conversations (Conversations with Comic Artists Series)
by Jean BraithwaiteVirtuoso Chris Ware (b. 1967) has achieved some noteworthy firsts for comics. The Guardian First Book Award for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth was the first major UK literary prize awarded for a graphic novel. In 2002 Ware was the first cartoonist included in the Whitney Biennial. Like Art Spiegelman or Alison Bechdel, Ware thus stands out as an important crossover artist who has made the wider public aware of comics as literature. His regular New Yorker covers give him a central place in our national cultural conversation. Since the earliest issues of ACME Novelty Library in the 1990s, cartoonist peers have acclaimed Ware’s distinctive, meticulous visual style and technical innovations to the medium. Ware also remains a literary author of the highest caliber, spending many years to create thematically complex graphic masterworks such as Building Stories and the ongoing Rusty Brown. Editor Jean Braithwaite compiles interviews displaying both Ware’s erudition and his quirky self-deprecation. They span Ware’s career from 1993 to 2015, creating a time-lapse portrait of the artist as he matures. Several of the earliest talks are reprinted from zines now extremely difficult to locate. Braithwaite has selected the best broadcasts and podcasts featuring the interview-shy Ware for this volume, including new transcriptions. An interview with Marnie Ware from 2000 makes for a delightful change of pace, as she offers a generous, supremely lucid attitude toward her husband and his work. Candidly and humorously, she considers married life with a cartoonist in the house. Brand-new interviews with both Chris and Marnie Ware conclude the volume.
Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)
by Burnis R. MorrisThis study reveals how historian Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) used the black press and modern public relations techniques to popularize black history during the first half of the twentieth century. Explanations for Woodson's success with the modern black history movement usually include his training, deep-rooted principles, and single-minded determination. Often overlooked, however, is Woodson's skillful use of newspapers in developing and executing a public education campaign built on truth, accuracy, fairness, and education. Burnis R. Morris explains how Woodson attracted mostly favorable news coverage for his history movement due to his deep understanding of the newspapers' business and editorial models as well as his public relations skills, which helped him merge the interests of the black press with his cause.Woodson's publicity tactics, combined with access to the audiences granted him by the press, enabled him to drive the black history movement--particularly observance of Negro History Week and fundraising activities. Morris analyzes Woodson's periodicals, newspaper articles, letters, and other archived documents describing Woodson's partnership with the black press and his role as a publicist. This rarely explored side of Woodson, who was often called the "Father of Black History," reintroduces Woodson's lost image as a leading cultural icon who used his celebrity in multiple roles as an opinion journalist, newsmaker, and publicist of black history to bring veneration to a disrespected subject. During his active professional career, 1915-1950, Woodson merged his interests and the interests of the black newspapers. His cause became their cause.
Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line
by Emily Ruth RutterWinner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cultural history more generally.
Thomas Jefferson on Wine
by John HailmanIn Thomas Jefferson on Wine, John Hailman celebrates a founding father's lifelong interest in wine and provides unprecedented insight into Jefferson's character from this unique perspective. In both his personal and public lives, Jefferson wielded his considerable expertise to influence the drinking habits of his friends, other founding fathers, and the American public away from hard liquor toward the healthier pleasures of wine. An international wine judge and nationally syndicated wine columnist, Hailman discusses how Jefferson's tastes developed, which wines and foods he preferred at different stages of his life, and how Jefferson became the greatest wine expert of the early American republic. Hailman explores the third president's fascination with scores of wines from his student days at Williamsburg to his lengthy retirement years at Monticello, using mainly Jefferson's own words from hundreds of immensely readable and surprisingly modern letters on the subject. Hailman examines Jefferson's five critical years in Paris, where he learned about fine wines at Europe's salons and dinner tables as American Ambassador. The book uses excerpts from Jefferson's colorful travel journals of his visits to France, Italy, and Germany, as well as his letters to friends and wine merchants, some of whose descendants still produce the wines Jefferson enjoyed. Vivid contemporaneous accounts of dinners at the White House allow readers to experience vicariously Jefferson's "Champagne diplomacy." The book concludes with an overview of the current restoration of the vineyards at Monticello and the new Monticello Wine Trail and its numerous world-class Virginia wineries. In Thomas Jefferson on Wine, Hailman presents an absorbing and unique view of this towering historical figure.
ICT Innovations 2023. Learning: 15th International Conference, ICT Innovations 2023, Ohrid, North Macedonia, September 24–26, 2023, Proceedings (Communications in Computer and Information Science #1991)
by Marija Mihova Mile JovanovThis book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on ICT Innovations 2023. Learning: Humans, Theory, Machines, and Data, ICT Innovations 2023, held in Ohrid, North Macedonia during September 24–26, 2023.The 17 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. They are organized in sections by topics as follows: AI and natural language processing; bioinformatics; dew computing; e-learning and e-services; image processing; network science; theoretical informatics.
Oceanic Wave Energy Conversion: Advancement of Electrical Generators
by Omar Farrok Md Rabiul IslamThis book aims to collect the latest theoretical and technological ideas in design and construction for different kinds of oceanic wave energy converters including linear electrical generators and drive systems. Advancements in new wave energy converters, linear machine topologies, integrated mathematical modeling, application of high graded magnetic materials, and high-performance control strategies are of great interest. With the ability to generate direct thrust without any mechanical transmission, the linear electrical machines serve as the excellent choice for wave energy generators, free piston engine, industrial applications requiring linear motion, and so on. On the other hand, the special characteristics of linear electrical machines, such as the large air gap length, force ripples, end effects, cogging force, cut open magnetic circuit, half-filled end slot, pose a great challenge to the engineer and scientist. The challenge is not only for designing electrical machines but also for control strategies. The chapters of this book have been structured with theoretical, simulation, and experimental results in such a way that it provides a consistent compilation of fundamental theories, a compendium of current research and development activities as well as new directions to overcome critical limitations.
Prospects for Soil Regeneration and Its Impact on Environmental Protection (Earth and Environmental Sciences Library)
by Sesan Abiodun Aransiola Babafemi Raphael Babaniyi Adejoke Blessing Aransiola Naga Raju MaddelaSoil is a complex system of inorganic and organic materials, living organisms, water, and air. It is home to more than one trillion species of microorganisms. Soil also plays an important role in the global carbon cycle. Because plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere, convert it to plant tissue, and return it to the soil as plant residue, soils globally act as the world’s largest sink of active carbon. Soil has role to play in food production and safety. Soil contamination undermined by modern agricultural practices that deplete soil carbon stocks. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have been raising recorded temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry, and fisheries have almost doubled in the last 50 years and will increase by 30% by 2050 given the current trend. The primacy of arresting climate change is nowhere more evident than the adoption of 195 countries of the first legally binding global climate deal at the Paris Climate Conference in 2015. With atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) reaching 400 parts per million in 2016, soils can be an ally in bringing the CO2 level down to a sustainable level if protected for regeneration. Soil protection and regeneration is a technique that involves the conservative rehabilitation of soil ecosystem and farmland. This technique focuses on top soil regeneration, improving the water cycle, supporting biosequestration, enhancing ecosystem services, increasing biodiversity, strengthening the vitality and health of farm soil, and increasing resilience to climate change and landscape. Environmental protection not only improves soil health, productivity, and resilience to weather extremes, raising farm yields and income while strengthening regional food security in the face of a changing climate, but can also form part of a region’s broader climate strategy. This book is timely as more studies and reviews need to be reported about regenerating global polluted soil and the impacts on the environment, the benefit of both biotic and abiotic structure, thereby creating more awareness of environmental protection and sustainability. Thus, this book presents a vista to research on regeneration of lost resources in the soil and its impacts on the environment.
Social Work and Social Policy Transformations in Central and Southeast Europe
by Maja Gerovska MitevThis book provides a picture of recent developments in social policy and social work in Central and Southeast Europe, especially trends after the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated significant welfare modifications. Through a comparative method, the book draws analytical conclusions about the interdependence between welfare state reforms and social work practices in Central and Southeast Europe and provides an overview of future perspectives regarding social policy and social service provision in this region. The book covers four EU member states (Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia) and three EU candidate countries (North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina). By critically contextualising existing welfare state categorisations, the book aims to examine the link between the welfare state reforms and implications for social work in Central and Southeast Europe. The country-based chapters of this contributed volume: outline the context in which social policy and social work have developed and map the main changes in the welfare state since the transition from socialism; elaborate the country-specific welfare state discourse and discussions, which through literature review depict the conceptual debates about the welfare state, social justice, equality, poverty, entitlements for cash transfer and services, privatization, and accessibility; indicate the key challenges in social policy and social work; and provide indications about the future perspectives of social policy and social service provision. Social Work and Social Policy Transformations in Central and Southeast Europe addresses the scarcity of literature on social policy and social work in this region. The book is primarily intended for social policy researchers and scholars, and students in social work, social policy, political science, and sociology. It is an invaluable resource for researchers from all fields of social sciences and should provoke wider academic and professional interest."The common themes of transformation, restructuring and crises, synthesized in excellent Introductory and Concluding chapters, make the book an essential source for an understanding of contemporary policies and practices, the complex role played by historical legacies, and offer a model of what a comparative policy approach should look like".—Paul Stubbs, Senior Research Fellow, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia
Smart Mobile Communication & Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the 15th IMCL Conference – Volume 1 (Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems #936)
by Michael E. Auer Thrasyvoulos TsiatsosInteractive mobile technologies are today the core of many—if not all—fields of society. Not only the younger generation of students expects a mobile working and learning environment. And nearly daily new ideas, technologies, and solutions boost this trend. To discuss and assess the trends in the interactive mobile field are the aims connected with the 15th International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication, Technologies, and Learning (IMCL2023), which was held 9–10 November 2023. Since its beginning in 2006, this conference is devoted to new approaches in interactive mobile technologies with a focus on learning. Nowadays, the IMCL conferences are a forum of the exchange of new research results and relevant trends as well as the exchange of experiences and examples of good practice. Interested readership includes policy makers, academics, educators, researchers in pedagogy and learning theory, schoolteachers, learning Industry, further education lecturers, etc.
Energy Materials and Devices: Proceedings of E-MAD 2022 (Advances in Sustainability Science and Technology)
by Ambesh Dixit Vijay K. Singh Shahab AhmadThis book is a collection of peer-reviewed best-selected research papers presented at the National Conference on Energy Materials and Devices (E-MAD 2022), organized by the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India, during 16–18 December 2022. The book focusses on the current state-of-the-art research and development in the field of lithium and beyond lithium-ion batteries as electrochemical energy storage devices for sustainable development to meet the energy storage needs. This includes the materials’ design using computational approaches together with experimental advances targeting the next-generation energy storage materials and devices such as photo rechargeable batteries. In addition, the proceedings also focus simultaneously on green hydrogen energy generation, storage, and integration in fuel cells. It includes the catalytically active nanoengineered materials for hydrogen generation, functionalized hydrides and their composites for enhanced hydrogen storage together withtheir possible integration in fuel cells for their direct energy generation applications.
Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling
by Anna R. BeresinWinner of the Opie Prize from the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore SocietyAs children wrestle with culture through their games, recess itself has become a battleground for the control of children's time. Based on dozens of interviews and the observation of over a thousand children in a racially integrated, working-class public school, Recess Battles is a moving reflection of urban childhood at the turn of the millennium. The book debunks myths about recess violence and challenges the notion that schoolyard play is a waste of time. The author videotaped and recorded children of the Mill School in Philadelphia from 1991 to 2004 and asked them to offer comments as they watched themselves at play. These sessions in Recess Battles raise questions about adult power and the changing frames of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. The grown-ups' clear misunderstanding of the complexity of children's play is contrasted with the richness of the children's folk traditions.Recess Battles is an ethnographic study of lighthearted games, a celebratory presentation of children's folklore and its conflicts, and a philosophical text concerning the ironies of everyday childhood. Rooted in video micro-ethnography and the traditions of theorists such as Bourdieu, Willis, and Bateson, Recess Battles is written for a lay audience with extensive academic footnotes. International scholar Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith contributes a foreword, and the children themselves illustrate the text with black and white paintings.
Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement
by Elaine Allen LechtreckIn 1963, the Sunday after four black girls were killed by a bomb in a Birmingham church, George William Floyd, a Church of Christ minister, preached a sermon based on the Golden Rule. He pronounced that Jesus Christ was asking Christians to view the bombing from the perspective of their black neighbors and asserted, "We don't realize it yet, but because Martin Luther King Jr. is preaching nonviolence, which is Jesus's way, someday Martin Luther King Jr. will be seen as the best friend the white man in the South has ever had." During the sermon, members of the congregation yelled, "You devil, you!" and, immediately, Floyd was dismissed. Although not every anti-segregation white minister was as outspoken as Pastor Floyd, many signed petitions, organized interracial groups, or preached gently from a gospel of love and justice. Those who spoke and acted outright on behalf of the civil rights movement were harassed, beaten, and even jailed.Based on interviews and personal memoirs, Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement traces the efforts of these clergymen who--deeply moved by the struggle of African Americans--looked for ways to reconcile the history of discrimination and slavery with Christian principles and to help their black neighbors. While many understand the role political leaders on national stages played in challenging the status quo of the South, this book reveals the significant contribution of these ministers in breaking down segregation through preaching a message of love.
Expressions of Place: The Contemporary Louisiana Landscape
by John R. KempExpressions of Place embarks on a journey across the rural and urban landscapes of Louisiana via the talents of thirty-seven artists located all around the state. Many are acclaimed professionals whose paintings are included in major private and public collections regionally and nationally. Others have found their followings closer to home. All, however, strive to express impressions of the land with artistic styles that range from traditional to the symbolic and almost totally abstract. Such a variety of interpretation becomes possible in a landscape that changes from dark cypress-shrouded bayous, trembling earth, grassy prairies, the gritty streets of inner city New Orleans to vast wind-swept coastal marshes and the piney hills of north and central Louisiana. Rather than stand as an encyclopedia, catalog, or history of the visual arts in Louisiana, Kemp's book is instead a celebration of the state's evocative landscape in the work of accomplished contemporary artists. It includes an introductory essay, which places these creators and their works in historical context. Expressions of Place provides readers with individual essays and biographical sketches in which the artists, in their own words, give insight as to what they paint, how they paint, where they paint, and why they are drawn to the Louisiana landscape. Particularly inspiring, the artists discuss their interpretations of that landscape directly with the viewing audience. Expressions of Place remains as much about the landscape of the artists' imaginations as it is about the land itself. With each painting, they have created visual poetry of a land and environment that has become a defining part of their lives.
Digitalisation of Global Business Services: Orchestrating the Enterprise Ecosystem (Technology, Work and Globalization)
by Albert Plugge Shahrokh NikouThe concept of Global Business Services (GBS) is well recognised and researched by both scholars and practitioners. However, the complexity of applying GBS has been the subject of various critiques due to its effect on firms’ business processes, service portfolio and provisioning of in-house as well as outsourced services. Although GBS results have been much criticised, this book argues that the rise of digitalisation reopens the question of implementing GBS successfully. The findings of this novel research, which is based on a multi-method approach, provide insights in relevant GBS factors and how these factors affect a GBS implementation strategy. Further analysis show how digitalisation, including platforms and AI, enable GBS organisations to decrease implementation issues. Research outcomes illustrate that firms which apply an enterprise ecosystem approach are better able to exchange GBS information. The willingness and ability of firms to intensify the collaboration at managerial and subject matter level will help to overcome GBS implementation challenges. This book puts forward the case that the rise of digitalisation enables GBS organisations to provide benefits and ensure that the GBS business model still matters. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of digital business and innovation.