Through political and cultural analysis of representations of the so-called war on drugs, Oswaldo Zavala makes the case that the very terms we use to describe drug traffickers are a constructed subterfuge for the real narcos: politicians, corporations, and the military. Though Donald Trump's incendiary comments and monstrous policies on the border reveal the character of a deeply depraved leader, state violence on both sides of the border is nothing new. Immigration has endured as a prevailing news topic, but it is a fixture of modern society in the neoliberal era; the future will be one of exile brought on by state violence and the plundering of our natural resources to sate capitalist greed. Yet, the realities of violence in Mexico and along the border are obscured by the books, films, and TV series we consume. In truth, works like Sicario, The Queen of the South, and Narcos hide Mexico's political realities. Along with these examples, Zavala discusses Charles Bowden, 2666 by Roberto BolaNo, and other important Latin American writers as examples of works that do capture the realities of the drug war. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist will be useful for journalists, political scientists, philosophers, and writers of any kind who wish to break down the constructed barriers-physical and mental-created by those in power around the reality of the Mexican drug trade.

Link prediction is required to understand the evolutionary theory of computing for different social networks. However, the stochastic growth of the social network leads to various challenges in identifying hidden links, such as representation of graph, distinction between spurious and missing links, selection of link prediction techniques comprised of network features, and identification of network types. Hidden Link Prediction in Stochastic Social Networks concentrates on the foremost techniques of hidden link predictions in stochastic social networks including methods and approaches that involve similarity index techniques, matrix factorization, reinforcement, models, and graph representations and community detections. The book also includes miscellaneous methods of different modalities in deep learning, agent-driven AI techniques, and automata-driven systems and will improve the understanding and development of automated machine learning systems for supervised, unsupervised, and recommendation-driven learning systems. It is intended for use by data scientists, technology developers, professionals, students, and researchers.

Social media has emerged as a powerful tool that reaches a wide audience with minimum time and effort. It has a diverse role in society and human life and can boost the visibility of information that allows citizens the ability to play a vital role in creating and fostering social change. This practice can have both positive and negative consequences on society. Examining the Roles of IT and Social Media in Democratic Development and Social Change is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of social media within community development and democracy. While highlighting topics including information capitalism, ethical issues, and e-governance, this book is ideally designed for social workers, politicians, public administrators, sociologists, journalists, policymakers, government administrators, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on social advancement and change through social media and technology.

Quality assurance is an essential aspect for ensuring the success of corporations worldwide. Consistent quality requirements across organizations of similar types ensure that these requirements can be accurately and easily evaluated. Shaping the Future Through Standardization is an essential scholarly book that examines quality and standardization within diverse organizations globally with a special focus on future perspectives, including how standards and standardization may shape the future. Featuring a wide range of topics such as economics, pedagogy, and management, this book is ideal for academicians, researchers, decision makers, policymakers, managers, corporate professionals, and students.

Political debates have reached unprecedented levels of interest around the globe as more individuals begin to comprehend government proceedings and discourse. Utilizing this knowledge, individuals are becoming attentive to political language, but they lack information on the motivation behind it. Argumentation and Appraisal in Parliamentary Discourse seeks to interrogate the argumentation practices and appraisal forms realized in parliamentary discourse on various topics. While highlighting topics that include legislative immunity, political rivalry, and language evolution, it features crucial discourse-pragmatic research on parliamentary proceedings from various parliamentary settings. This book is recommended for linguists, politicians, professionals, and researchers working in the fields of discourse analysis, linguistics, politics, communication sciences, sociology, and conversational analysis.

Changing practices and perceptions of parenthood and family life have long been the subject of intense public, political and academic attention. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role digital media and technologies can play in these shifts, yet this topic has been under-explored from a discourse analytical perspective. In response, this book's investigation of everyday parenting, family practices and digital media offers a new and innovative exploration of the relationship between parenting, family practices, and digitally mediated connection. This investigation is based on extensive digital and interview data from research with nine UK-based single and/or lesbian, gay or bisexual parents who brought children into their lives in non-traditional ways, for example through donor conception, surrogacy or adoption. Through a novel approach that combines constructivist grounded theory with mediated discourse analysis, this book examines connected family lives and practices in a way that transcends the limiting social, biological and legal structures that still dominate concepts of family in contemporary society.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business-a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the communities of exhibitors and creative workers that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture-taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), and challenges the canon of film periodicals, offering new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism's relationship with the motion picture industry and its continued impact on creative industries today.

This intriguing volume sheds light on the diverse world of collecting film- and media-related materials. Lucy Fischer's introduction explores theories of collecting and representations of collecting and collections in film, while arguing that collections of film ephemera and other media-related collections are an important way in to understanding the relationship between material culture and film and media studies; she notes that the collectors have various motivations and types of collections. In the eleven chapters that follow, media studies scholars analyze a variety of fascinating collected materials, from Doris Day magazines to Godzilla action figures and LEGOs. While most contributors discuss their personal collections, some also offer valuable insight into specific collections of others. In many cases, collections that began as informal and personal have been built up, accessioned, and reorganized to create teaching and research materials which have significantly contributed to the field of film and media studies. Readers are offered glimpses into diverse collections comprised of films, fan magazines, records, comics, action figures, design artifacts, costumes, props- including Buffy the Vampire Slayer costumes, Planet of the Apes publicity materials, and Amazing Spider Man comics. Recollecting Collecting interrogates and illustrates the meaning and practical nature of film and media collections while also considering the vast array of personal and professional motivations behind their assemblage.

Does the internet facilitate social and political change, or even democratization, in the Middle East? Despite existing research on this subject, there is still no consensus on the importance of social media and online platforms, or on how we are to understand their influence. This book provides empirical analysis of the day-to-day use of online platforms by activists in Egypt and Kuwait. The research evaluates the importance of online platforms for effecting change and establishes a specific framework for doing so. Egypt and Kuwait were chosen because, since the mid-2000s, they have been the most prominent Arab countries in terms of online and offline activism. In the context of Kuwait, Jon Nordenson examines the oppositional youth groups who fought for a constitutional, democratic monarchy in the emirate. In Egypt, focus surrounds the groups and organizations working against sexual violence and sexual harassment. Online Activism in the Middle East shows how and why online platforms are used by activists and identifies the crucial features of successful online campaigns. Egypt and Kuwait are revealed to be authoritarian contexts but where the challenges and possibilities faced by activists are quite different. The comparative nature of this research therefore exposes the context-specific usage of online platforms, separating this from the more general features of online activism. Nordenson demonstrates the power of online activism to create an essential 'counterpublic' that can challenge an authoritarian state and enable excluded groups to fight in ways that are far more difficult to suppress than a demonstration.

Spatial Regression Analysis Using Eigenvector Spatial Filtering provides theoretical foundations and guides practical implementation of the Moran eigenvector spatial filtering (MESF) technique. MESF is a novel and powerful spatial statistical methodology that allows spatial scientists to account for spatial autocorrelation in their georeferenced data analyses. Its appeal is in its simplicity, yet its implementation drawbacks include serious complexities associated with constructing an eigenvector spatial filter. This book discusses MESF specifications for various intermediate-level topics, including spatially varying coefficients models, (non) linear mixed models, local spatial autocorrelation, space-time models, and spatial interaction models. Spatial Regression Analysis Using Eigenvector Spatial Filtering is accompanied by sample R codes and a Windows application with illustrative datasets so that readers can replicate the examples in the book and apply the methodology to their own application projects. It also includes a Foreword by Pierre Legendre.

This book examines the question of what we mean when we talk about life, revealing new insights into what life is, what it does, and why it matters. Jenell Johnson studies arguments on behalf of life-not just of the human or animal variety, but all life. She considers, for example, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's fight for water, deep ecologists' Earth First! activism, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and astrophysicists' positions on Martian microbes. What she reveals is that this advocacy-vital advocacy-expands our view of what counts as life and shows us what it would mean for the moral standing of human life to be extended to life itself. Including short interviews with celebrated ecological writer Dorion Sagan, former NASA Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley, and leading figure in Indigenous and environmental studies Kyle Whyte, Every Living Thing provides a capacious view of life in the natural world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in biodiversity, bioethics, and the environment.

Most students struggle with learning how to find references, use them effectively, and cite them appropriately in a required format. One of the most common formats is that of APA. The authors all have vast experience teaching writing courses to various levels of studentsfrom undergraduates to graduates in other countries. However, there was lacking a book that could explain the basics of APA in simple, easy-to-understand language for non-native speakers of English, who are often unfamiliar with using references and formatting an essay in a particular method. In order to offer English Learner student writers a source of information that is appropriate for their level, and is cost-effective, this updated APA 7th edition guidebook provides students with important information in clear, concise, user-friendly language, as well as to offer practical examples that will help them grasp the concept of secondary research writing. Much of the published materials on the market targets native speakers of English. The problem with this is that they present the nitpicky details of APA in ways that do not make sense to native speakers of English, let alone to those for whom English is not their first language, because the information is presented in very technical terms that are not easyto understand. This handbook presents the same information in simplified terms with images and step-by-step instructions in ways that make sense to both native and non-native English speaking student writers. Additionally, student writers often struggle with understanding the concept of plagiarism, as well as how to find sources, evaluate the appropriateness of sources, and use sources in effective ways (e.g., how to integrate quotes, when to paraphrase, among others). This book provides this important information that is concise and easy to understand. NOTE: This is a REVISED edition of our original The Concise APA Handbook, which has been updated for APA 7th edition, which was issued in the fall, 2019.

The role of cultural memory in American identity Terrorism in American Memory argues that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and all that followed in its wake were the primary force shaping United States politics and culture in the post-9/11 era. Marita Sturken maintains that during the past two decades, when the country was subjected to terrorist attacks and promulgated ongoing wars of aggression, we have veered into increasingly polarized factions and been extraordinarily preoccupied with memorialization and the politics of memory. The post-9/11 era began with a hunger for memorialization and it ended with massive protests over police brutality that demanded the destruction of historical monuments honoring racist historical figures. Sturken argues that memory is both the battleground and the site for negotiations of national identity because it is a field through which the past is experienced in the present. The paradox of these last two decades is that it gave rise to an era of intensely nationalistic politics in response to global terrorism at the same time that it released the containment of the ghosts of terrorism embedded within US history. And within that disruption, new stories emerged, new memories were unearthed, and the story of the nation is being rewritten. For these reasons, this book argues that the post-9/11 era has come to an end, and we are now in a new still undefined era with new priorities and national demands. An era preoccupied with memory thus begins with the memorial projects of 9/11 and ends with the radical intervention of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the Lynching Memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama, a project that, unlike the nationalistic 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York, dramatically rewrites the national script of American history. Woven within analyses of memorialization, memorials, memory museums, art projects on memory, and architectural projects is a discussion about design and architecture, the increased creation of memorials as experiences, and the role of architecture as national symbolism and renewal. Terrorism in American Memory sheds light on the struggles over who is memorialized, who is forgotten, and what that politics of memory reveals about the United States as an imaginary and a nation.