This book intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses.

We communicate multimodally. Everyday communication involves not only words, but gestures, images, videos, sounds and of course, music. Music has traditionally been viewed as a separate object that we can isolate, discuss, perform and listen to. However, much of music's power lies in its use as multimodal communication. It is not just lyrics which lend songs their meaning, but images and musical sounds as well. The music industry, governments and artists have always relied on posters, films and album covers to enhance music's semiotic meaning. Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest considers musical sound as multimodal communication, examining the interacting meaning potential of sonic aspects such as rhythm, instrumentation, pitch, tonality, melody and their interrelationships with text, image and other modes, drawing upon, and extending the conceptual territory of social semiotics. In so doing, this book brings together research from scholars to explore questions around how we communicate through musical discourse, and in the discourses of music. Methods in this collection are drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis, Social Semiotics and Music Studies to expose both the function and semiotic potential of the various modes used in songs and other musical texts. These analyses reveal how each mode works in various contexts from around the world often articulating counter-hegemonic and subversive discourses of identity and belonging.

This book explores the aesthetic and ethical ways in which history and daily life are filmically represented and witnessed in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's movies. From the era of the Japanese Occupation to the White Horror and then to the lifting of martial law, the author shows how Hou Hsiao-hsien uses visual media to evoke the rhythms of daily life through the emotional memory of the characters and communities he explores. In particular, the book focuses on the ways in which Hou Hsiao-hsien seeks to reflect the strong dilemmas of identity and the traumatic emotions associated with witnessing history. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates the concepts of daily life, representation and historical trauma in order to focus on how these films represent history and political trauma through the nature of daily life and personal memories, and the resulting historical responsibility and ethics. This is the first academic monography about Hou Hsiao-hsien's films.

The book showcases research on digital entertainment solutions in different sectors. In recent years, digital media have evolved to include bandwidth-rich, smart, and connected platforms accessed via computers, tablets, smart phones, social media, and video game consoles. The high connectivity and vast processing capacity of these platforms have allowed for platform-agnostic, streaming, always-on, entertainment-on-demand consumption of digital content in a way distinct from traditional models of entertainment consumption. Moving beyond the unilateral delivery of content, with fixed positions of the entertainers and the entertained, digital entertainment is now dynamically generated by users and providers, blurring the boundary between producers and consumers of entertainment. With the increasing accessibility of multimodal media that surround audiences with sensory-rich information, digital entertainment is becoming more immersive.

Joining the debate on gender differences, this book presents a cross-section of current research in communication, language, and gender studies. The first part presents studies that ask how women and men differ on a range of communication variables and suggest reasons for these differences. The second part offers a variety of critiques of masculine cultural hegemony. The third part envisions how gender differences may be reconceptualized in order to open key cultural institutions to honor both women and men. Taken as a whole, the chapters inform one another in a creative, dialectical tension. Examining what researchers mean by gender differences and values implicit in the term is critical to understanding current trends in gender studies.

This book offers a comprehensive view on resilience based upon state-of-the-science theories and methodological applications that resilience may fill. Specifically, this text provides a compendium of knowledge on the theory, methods, and practice of resilience across a variety of country and case contexts, and demonstrates how a resilience-based approach can help further improved infrastructure, vibrant societies, and sustainable environments and ecologies, among many others. Resilience is a term with thousands of years of history. Only recently has resilience been applied to the management of complex interconnected systems, yet its impact as a governing philosophy and an engineering practice has been pronounced. Colloquially, resilience has been used as a synonym for 'bouncing back'. Philosophically and methodologically, however, it is much more. In a world defined by interconnected and interdependent systems such as water, food, energy, transportation, and the internet, a sudden and unexpected disruption to one critical system can lead to significant challenges for many others. The Science and Practice of Resilience is beneficial for those seeking to gain a rich knowledge of the resilience world, as well as for practitioners looking for methods and tools by which resilience may be applied in real-world contexts.

The must-have resource for media selling in today's technology-driven environment The revised and updated fifth edition of Media Selling is an essential guide to our technology-driven, programmatic, micro-targeted, mobile, multi-channel media ecosystem. Today, digital advertising has surpassed television as the number-one ad investment platform, and Google and Facebook dominate the digital advertising marketplace. The authors highlight the new sales processes and approaches that will give media salespeople a leg up on the competition in our post-Internet media era. The book explores the automated programmatic buying and selling of digital ad inventory that is disrupting both media buyers and media salespeople. In addition to information on disruptive technologies in media sales, the book explores sales ethics, communication theory and listening, emotional intelligence, creating value, the principles of persuasion, sales stage management guides, and sample in-person, phone, and email sales scripts. Media Selling offers media sellers a customer-first and problem-solving sales approach. The updated fifth edition: Contains insight from digital experts into how 82.5% of digital ad inventory is bought and sold programmatically Reveals how to conduct research on Google Analytics Identifies how media salespeople can offer cross-platform and multi-channel solutions to prospects' advertising and marketing challenge Includes insights into selling and distribution of podcasts Includes links to downloadable case studies, presentations, and planners on the Media Selling website Includes an extensive Glossary of Digital Advertising terms Written for students in communications, radio-TV, and mass communication, Media Selling is the classic work in the field. The updated edition provides an indispensable tool for learning, training, and mastering sales techniques for digital media.

This 11-volume collection contains titles originally published between 1931 and 1992. It examines the genre of comedy, from its roots in ancient Greece, through the centuries, to the relatively modern stand-up variety. The individual titles include the theory of comedy; perspectives on women and comedy; comedy in film; European comedy; Restoration comedy and more. This set will be a valuable resource for those students interested in comedy in both literature and drama.

Political campaigns are highly complex and sophisticated communication events: communication of issues, images, social reality, and persons. They are essential exercises in the creation, re-creation, and transmission of significant symbols through human communication. As voters and others involved with the campaigns attempt to make sense of the political environment, political bits of communication inform voting choices, world views, and legislative desires.

The essays in this book examine the key elements in that process throughout the 1996 presidential campaign. Each focuses on a specific area of political campaign communication: the communication functions and activities across the campaign phases from nomination conventions through the debates, political advertising, the discussion and framing of issues, images of the candidates and their wives, the role and impact of network and local news, political cartoons, and the digital/on-line arena. This text will appeal to students and scholars alike as well as to concerned citizens involved with presidential politics and political campaigns.

This book explores the practices in a Zen Buddhist temple located in Northwest Ohio against the backdrop of globalization. Drawing on the previous studies on Buddhist modernization and westernization, it provides a better understanding of the westernization of Buddhism and its adapted practices and rituals in the host culture. Using rhetorical criticism methodology, the author approaches this temple as an embodiment of Buddhist rhetoric with both discursive and non-discursive expressions within the discourses of modernity. By analyzing the rhetorical practices at the temple through abbots' teaching videos, the temple website, members' dharma names, and the materiality of the temple space and artifacts, the author discovers how Buddhist rhetoric functions to constitute and negotiate the religious identities of the community members through its various rituals and activities. At the same time, the author examines how the temple's space and settings facilitate the collective the formation and preservation of the Buddhist identity. Through a nuanced discussion of Buddhist rhetoric, this book illuminates a new rhetorical methodology to understand religious identity construction. Furthermore, it offers deeper insights into the future development of modern Buddhism, which are also applicable to Buddhist practitioners and other major world religions.

The invited authors of this edited volume have been prolific in the arena of Real Data Analysis (RDA) as it applies to the social and behavioral sciences, especially in the disciplines of education and psychology. Combined, this brain trust represents 3,247 articles in refereed journals, 127 books published, US $45.3 Million in extramural research funding, 34 teaching and 92 research awards, serve(d) as Editor/Assistant Editor/Editorial Board Member for 95 peer reviewed journals, and provide( d) ad hoc reviews for 362 journals. Their enormous footprint on real data analysis is showcased for professors, researchers, educators, administrators, and graduate students in the second text in the AERA/SIG ES Quantitative Methods series.

In the years since World War II, commercial television has become the most powerful force in American culture. It is also the quintessential example of postmodernist culture. This book studies how "The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks," and "The X-Files" display many of the central characteristics that critics and theorists have associated with postmodernism, including fragmentation of narratives and characters, multiplicity in style and genre, and the collapse of traditional categorical boundaries of all kinds. The author labels these series strange TV since they challenge the conventions of television programming, thus producing a form of cognitive estrangement that potentially encourages audiences to question received ideas.

Despite their challenges to the conventions of commercial television, however, these series pose no real threat to the capitalist order. In fact, the very characteristics that identify these series as postmodern are also central characteristics of capitalism itself, especially in its late consumerist phase. An examination of these series within the context of postmodernism thus confirms Fredric Jameson's thesis that postmodernism is a reflection of the cultural logic of late capitalism. At the same time, these series do point toward the potential of television as a genuinely innovative medium that promises to produce genuinely new forms of cultural expression in the future.

Parks, maps, and mapping technologies like the GPS are objects of visual and material culture that rely on the interplay of text, context, image, and space to guide our interpretations of the world around us. LOCATING VISUAL-MATERIAL RHETORICS: THE MAP, THE MILL, AND THE GPS examines in depth, and in several contemporary settings, how visual and material discursive artifacts, when understood as rhetorical, shape our understanding of the unique cultural moments that these artifacts set out to represent. Using three cases that involve an exploration of the corporeal influence of the green spaces and commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts; the cartographic texts produced by GPS devices; and two maps involved in a federal court case about marine mammal protection, this book explores and tests the value of what Propen calls "visual-material rhetorics," or a visual rhetoric more expressly attuned to studies of space, the body, and materiality. Grounding all three cases is a theoretical approach that combines Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopias with Carole Blair's theory of material rhetoric. Such an approach brings Foucault's important work on spatiality into conversation with visual-material rhetorics to show how we benefit from conceptualizing rhetorical objects as not merely textual in the traditional sense but also as both visual and material-as spatial. Together, the cases in this book demonstrate how visual-material rhetorics illuminate the contexts that shape our various lived and embodied experiences and how visual-material rhetorics function in the service of advocacy. AMY D. PROPEN is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota. Her research on visual rhetoric, critical cartographies, and rhetoric as advocacy has appeared in journals and edited collections, including Technical Communication Quarterly, Written Communication, ACME: An International E-Journal of Critical Geographies, and Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. She is co-author, with Mary Lay Schuster, of Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases.

Handbook of Media Economics provides valuable information on a unique field that has its own theories, evidence, and policies. Understanding the media is important for society, and while new technologies are altering the media, they are also affecting our understanding of their economics. The book spans the large scope of media economics, simultaneously offering in-depth analysis of particular topics, including the economics of why media are important, how media work (including financing sources, institutional settings, and regulation), what determines media content (including media bias), and the effects of new technologies. The book provides a powerful introduction for those interested in starting research in media economics.

When the new medium of CD-ROMs emerged, industry figures and critics alike proclaimed their virtually unlimited potential. Adapting material from well-established media like television and film, CD-ROMs have quickly transformed genres such as science fiction and horror. At the same time, the realities of actual CD-ROMs often fall short of their utopian visions.

On a Silver Platter marks a "coming of age" for CD-ROMs as a commercially and aesthetically significant medium demanding critical attention. Greg Smith brings together media scholars such as Lisa Cartwright, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, and Scott Bukatman to analyze how CD-ROMs offer alternatives to familiar places--to museums, to cities, and especially to classrooms. Examining specific CD-ROM titles, including, Sim City, Civilization, and Phantasmagoria, the contributors argue that CD-ROMs are complex texts worthy of close consideration, both for how they have changed our understanding of space and genre, and for how they will impact the development of future media.

By examining particular CD-ROM texts and contexts, On a Silver Platter probes this new medium for insight and understanding into the current state of multimedia and into the future of technology.

A unique work of history that examines the story of a pivotal figure in American life, the U.S. war reporter, with contributions from some of the most influential journalists of our time.

Whether dodging sniper fire, accompanying strategic bombing raids over enemy territory, challenging the Pentagon's version of events, or crossing the frontlines to interview figures at the heart of the conflict, war correspondents have served as the eyes and ears of the nation, conveying the facts, the brutality and the drama of warfare, and shaping public opinion in the process.

Now for the first time, in Reporting America at War, the nation's most respected reporters share their stories to create a fascinating oral history. Contributors include:

• Christiane Amanpour
• Peter Arnett
• Malcolm Browne
• Walter Cronkite
• Gloria Emerson
• Frank Gibney
• David Halberstam
• Chris Hedges
• Ward Just
• Andy Rooney
• Morley Safer

In addition to telling their personal stories, the correspondents examine issues such as censorship, propaganda, ethics, the power of the press, and the future of war reporting, especially after September 11th.

This book provides an outline of theoretical concepts and their experimental verification in studies of self-organization phenomena in chemical systems, as they emerged in the mid-20th century and have evolved since. Presenting essays on selected topics, it was prepared by authors who have made profound contributions to the field. Traditionally, physical chemistry has been concerned with interactions between atoms and molecules that produce a variety of equilibrium structures - or the 'dead' order - in a stationary state. But biological cells exhibit a different 'living' kind of order, prompting E. Schroedinger to pose his famous question "What is life?" in 1943. Through an unprecedented theoretical and experimental development, it was later revealed that biological self-organization phenomena are in complete agreement with the laws of physics, once they are applied to a special class of thermodynamically open systems and non-equilibrium states. This knowledge has in turn led to the design and synthesis of simple inorganic systems capable of self-organization effects. These artificial 'living organisms' are able to operate on macroscopic to microscopic scales, even down to single-molecule machines. In the future, such research could provide a basis for a technological breakthrough, comparable in its impact with the invention of lasers and semiconductors. Its results can be used to control natural chemical processes, and to design artificial complex chemical processes with various functionalities. The book offers an extensive discussion of the history of research on complex chemical systems and its future prospects.

This book explains the fundamentals of control theory for Internet of Things (IoT) systems and smart grids and its applications. It discusses the challenges imposed by large-scale systems, and describes the current and future trends and challenges in decision-making for IoT in detail, showing the ongoing industrial and academic research in the field of smart grid domain applications. It presents step-by-step design guidelines for the modeling, design, customisation and calibration of IoT systems applied to smart grids, in which the challenges increase with each system's increasing complexity. It also provides solutions and detailed examples to demonstrate how to use the techniques to overcome these challenges, as well as other problems related to decision-making for successful implementation. Further, it anaylses the features of decision-making, such as low-complexity and fault-tolerance, and uses open-source and publicly available software tools to show readers how they can design, implement and customise their own system control instantiations. This book is a valuable resource for power engineers and researchers, as it addresses the analysis and design of flexible decision-making mechanisms for smart grids. It is also of interest to students on courses related to control of large-scale systems, since it covers the use of state-of-the-art technology with examples and solutions in every chapter. And last but not least, it offers practical advice for professionals working with smart grids.

The serial killer has become an obsession ever since Jack the Ripper became a media sensation, embedding a new and horrifying type of murderer into our cultural consciousness - one who kills darkly and in the dark. All popular media - print, radio, television, and so on - have become absorbed by this new figure. This book traces its diffusion through all media and discusses what this reveals about modern society. Using the Dexter saga of novels and television programs as its basis, the book argues that a "Dexter Syndrome" has emerged whereby we no longer see a difference between real and fictional serial killers. The psychological and social reasons for this are explored by tracing pop culture texts themselves (movies, novels, etc.). Above all else, Dexter's concept of a "moral code" forms a thematic thread that allows the author to argue that our contemporary moral nihilism has produced the demand for horror and horrific characters like serial killers, who have replaced medieval demons and monsters.

The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities takes a new look at C.P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures, a distinction that provides the driving force for a book that contends that the Internet revolution has sown the seeds for transformative changes in both the sciences and the humanities. It is because of this common situation that the humanities can learn from the sciences, as well as the sciences from the humanities, in matters central to both: generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge on the Internet. In a succession of chapters, the authors deal with the state of the art in web-based journal articles and books, web sites, peer review, and post-publication review. In the final chapter, they address the obstacles the academy and scientific organizations face in taking full advantage of the Internet: outmoded tenure and promotion procedures, the cost of open access, and restrictive patent and copyright law. They also argue that overcoming these obstacles does not require revolutionary institutional change. In their view, change must be incremental, making use of the powers and prerogatives scientific and academic organizations already have.

This book presents new efficient methods for optimization in realistic large-scale, multi-agent systems. These methods do not require the agents to have the full information about the system, but instead allow them to make their local decisions based only on the local information, possibly obtained during communication with their local neighbors. The book, primarily aimed at researchers in optimization and control, considers three different information settings in multi-agent systems: oracle-based, communication-based, and payoff-based. For each of these information types, an efficient optimization algorithm is developed, which leads the system to an optimal state. The optimization problems are set without such restrictive assumptions as convexity of the objective functions, complicated communication topologies, closed-form expressions for costs and utilities, and finiteness of the system's state space.

This book contains the proceedings of the Sixth National Conference of the Italian Systems Society. The title, Towards a post-Bertalanffy Systemics, aims to underline the need for Systemics and Systems Science to generalize theoretically concepts related to complexity (the great enemy of Bertalanffy Systemics). Hopefully this goal should be achieved by working in an inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary fashion, using systemic concepts arising from various disciplines and from the original, or Bertalanffy Systemics, as well. The interdisciplinary nature of the original Systemics and its power of generalization were given, overall, by the fact that the problems and solutions of one discipline become problems and solutions for another. Today, the modeling and interpretation of multidisciplinary approaches and representations makes easier to recognize these interconnections. The context, however, has changed dramatically. Of course, the challenge is still to find theoretical generalizations and applications, even where we have a lot of specificities, but we know very little on how to combine them. We cannot, however, simply replace the old with the new, but we must introduce strategies to recognize, represent, model and act on new levels, combining multiple representations, functions and emergence. In many disciplines this has been already done, and inevitably well, since targets and projects are well specified and oriented. The challenge is to do it for Systemics, with the vocations of cultural and theoretical generalization. Examples of new issues introduced by such theoretical disciplinary improvements, dealt with by many disciplines, include the study of mesoscopic or middle-way level, of multiple and dynamic coherence, of equivalence/non-equivalence, of fractality, of networks, of non-causality, of non-invasiveness, of non-prescribability, of non-separability, of quasi properties, of symmetry properties, of topological dynamics, as well as of quantum theories and concepts. The conference was devoted to identifying, discussing and understanding possible interrelationships of theoretical disciplinary improvements, recognized as having prospective fundamental roles for a new post-Bertalanffy Systemics. The latter should be able to deal with problems related to complexity in a generalized way. In this context the inter-disciplinarity should consists, for instance, in a disciplinary reformulation of problems, as from algebraic to geometrical, from military to political, from biological to chemical, while the trans-disciplinarity should be related to the study of such reformulations and their properties. The Italian Systems Society (AIRS) was founded in the 1996. The AIRS is a network of academicians, scientists, researchers and professionals involved in Systemics. A partial list of disciplines represented is: Architecture Biology Economics Education Engineering Mathematics Neurosciences Medicine Music Philosophy Psychology Physics. Previous conferences had as open lecturers professors Arecchi, Haken, Klir, and Kauffman. The proceedings have been published as: 1. Minati, G., (ed.), (1998), Proceedings of the first Italian Conference on Systemics, Apogeo Scientifica, Milan, Italy. 2. Minati, G., and Pessa, E., (eds.) (2002), Emergence in Complex Cognitive, Social and Biological Systems. Kluwer, New York. 3. Minati, G., Pessa, E., and Abram, M., (eds.), (2006), Systemics of Emergence: Research and Applications. Springer, New York. 4. Minati, G., Abram, M. and Pessa, E., (eds.), (2009), Processes of emergence of systems and systemic properties. Towards a general theory of emergence. World Scientific, Singapore. 5. Minati, G., Abram, M. and Pessa, E., (eds.), (2012), Methods, Models, simulations and approaches - towards a general theory of change. World Scientific, Singapore.

The papers collected in this volume focus on new perspectives on individuals, society, and science, specifically in the field of socio-economic systems. The book is the result of a scientific collaboration among experts from "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi (Romania), "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy), "University of Defence" of Brno (Czech Republic), and "Pablo de Olavide" University of Sevilla (Spain). The heterogeneity of the contributions presented in this volume reflects the variety and complexity of social phenomena. The book is divided in four Sections as follows. The first Section deals with recent trends in social decisions. Specifically, it aims to understand which are the driving forces of social decisions. The second Section focuses on the social and public sphere. Indeed, it is oriented on recent developments in social systems and control. Trends in quantitative theories and models are described in Section 3, where many new formal, mathematical-statistical tools for modelling complex social phenomena are presented. Finally, Section 4 shows integrative theories and models; particularly, it deals with the ethical, cultural and political approaches to social science, the pedagogical methods, and the relationship between literature, politics, religion and society. The book is addressed to sociologists, philosophers, mathematicians, statisticians, people interested in ethics, and specialists in the fields of communication, social, and political sciences.

Ordinal Computability discusses models of computation obtained by generalizing classical models, such as Turing machines or register machines, to transfinite working time and space. In particular, recognizability, randomness, and applications to other areas of mathematics are covered.