This book offers an in-depth analysis of Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer, an Afrofuturist project that appeared simultaneously as a concept album and a visual album or "emotion picture" in spring 2018. In the previous decade, Janelle Monae has developed into a global media personality who effortlessly unites speculative world-building with social and political activism. Across the intersecting album and film that together make up Dirty Computer, Monae brings together the science-fictional themes that informed her previous work, resulting in a powerfully focused artistic and political statement. While the music on the album can be enjoyed as an accessible collection of pop tracks, the accompanying film, music videos, and media paratexts add layers of meaning that combine speculative world-building with anti-racist activism. This unique convergence of energies, ideas, and media platforms has made Dirty Computer a new classic of Afrofuturist science fiction.

Whether one describes them as sequential art, graphic narratives or graphic novels, comics have become a vital part of contemporary culture. Their range of expression contains a tremendous variety of forms, genres and modes from high to low, from serial entertainment for children to complex works of art. This has led to a growing interest in comics as a field of scholarly analysis, as comics studies has established itself as a major branch of criticism. This handbook combines a systematic survey of theories and concepts developed in the field alongside an overview of the most important contexts and themes and a wealth of close readings of seminal works and authors. It will prove to be an indispensable handbook for a large readership, ranging from researchers and instructors to students and anyone else with a general interest in this fascinating medium.

Patterns II includes ten scholarly essays on a variety of science fiction themes and topics, as presented at ConStellation, the Forty-First World SF Convention, held at Baltimore, Maryland, from September 1-5, 1983. Included are essays by Merritt Abrash, Rosemarie Arbur, Jared Lobdell, Edward A. Boyno, Constance M. Mellott, Lawrence I. Charters, Thomas P. Dunn, Judith B. Kerman, Philip E. Kaveny, and Janice M. Bogstad on such writers as H. G. Wells, Thornton Wilder, David Gerrold, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick, and on the film Blade Runner. Includes a comprehensive Introduction by Hassler.

This book investigates how political parties from 12 European countries used Facebook to inform, interact with and mobilise voters at the 2019 European Parliament election. Following a joint theoretical framework and method, the results of a content analysis of more than 14,000 Facebook posts are presented. Country specific chapters are followed by analyses of European parties' Facebook campaigning, the spread of populism and the use of Facebook ads by the parties. The final chapter compares all countries showing that campaigns are more strongly shaped by the national than by the European political context. Facebook is used for campaigning as usual; parties inform and persuade but neglect the platform's mobilisation and particularly interactive affordances.

Java Card is one of the latest developments in the area of multi-application and platform-independent smart cards. As a working tool for professionals, this easy-to-understand resource provides clear, detailed guidance on smart cards, credit and debit cards, Java Card and Open Card Framework (OCF). It offers in-depth coverage of important standards, open specifications and critical security issues, including common threats and security mechanisms regarding the card and its connection interface. The book explains how to program a Java Card applet, an OCF card service and a terminal application. What's more, the book presents an informative case study on the credit-debit application, offering a detailed road map of the application development process.

Nationally, teachers, administrators, school board members and other stakeholders are increasingly concerned about the status of student achievement. Lawmakers have often sought "silver bullet" and "quick fix" solutions to the complex problem of improving school performance with little or no impact. Performance is Key "opens the door" to Connecting the Links to Leadership and Excellence by providing the essential elements necessary to reach higher performance levels but is also diagnostic and prescriptive in identifying the disconnections that impede higher performance and provides practical solutions through a framework for improvement along with associated success strategies. Practitioners and aspiring leaders will appreciate not only the rationale for immediate action but the systemic approach to excellence. Dr. Vince Cotter and Dr. Bob Hassler recognize that it is often the subtle nuances of how and what we do that can make a difference between success and failure. Too often reflection is overlooked in its potential to assess the status of an organization and its ability to provide direction to leaders in moving an organization toward higher performance. Poignant and thought provoking questions assist to position a leader's thinking, overview and focus on performance. Performance is Key also recognizes that real sustainable solutions are internally developed in a collaborative manner and that all schools and districts have the capacity to improve performance outcomes. To further assist educational leaders, a framework and an assessment instrument "crosscheck" the operational nature of key elements for success among school and district stakeholders. While common "pitfalls" to higher performance are noted, leaders are provided with a host of practical tools, strategies and recommendations to overcome obstacles, build internal support and to reach higher levels of performance. Performance is Key will demonstrate the importance of utilizing the four essential elements in a coordinated and collaborative manner and how leaders can execute implementation plans which incorporate those elements in a synergistic way that will lead to high performance. In an effort to make improved performance a reality, professional development activities are provided in the form of worksheets and leadership exercises to build a culture of continuous improvement and a belief that each and every school has the internal capacity to reach excellence.

In the age of globalization, digitization, and media convergence, traditional hierarchies between media are breaking down. This book offers new approaches to understanding the politics and their underlying ideologies that are reshaping our global media landscape, including questions of audience participation and transmedia storytelling.

Between 1861 and 1865 seven men commanded the North's Army of the Potomac. All found themselves, one by one, pitted against a soldier of consummate ability, Robert E. Lee. How did they react to this supreme test? What were their patterns of conduct in battle and at the conference table? This book takes the measure of each soldier at the crucial moment of his life and the life of the nation.

Well-known critic Hassler here contributes a comprehensive survey of Asimov's major fiction, from his beginnings as a short-story writer in "The Campbell Years," through his early and juvenile novels, including a complete outline and evaluation of the author's ever-popular Robot and Foundation series. Starmont Reader's Guide 40.

Contemporary international aid consists of a wide range of various support programs, where the end-result in many cases not only reflects the needs of the recipient country, but also the interests of the donor country. In Science and Politics of Foreign Aid - Swedish Environmental Support to the Baltic States it is shown that this particular support has been directed primarily towards areas of joint concern, such as air pollution and effluents to the Baltic Sea. Environmental problems with primarily local effects have, to a large extent, been neglected in the Swedish support program. The requirement on the Baltic recipient countries to finance a specific fraction of each joint program with local resources has furthermore drained the local national environmental budgets from resources, making it very difficult for these countries to mitigate various local environmental hazards by themselves.

In contrast to many previous foreign aid studies where various donor country biases often are suggested but not empirically validated, this book gives an in-depth view of how a particular support program is influenced by specific and self-interested considerations.

This textbook gives a comprehensive introduction to stochastic processes and calculus in the fields of finance and economics, more specifically mathematical finance and time series econometrics. Over the past decades stochastic calculus and processes have gained great importance, because they play a decisive role in the modeling of financial markets and as a basis for modern time series econometrics. Mathematical theory is applied to solve stochastic differential equations and to derive limiting results for statistical inference on nonstationary processes. This introduction is elementary and rigorous at the same time. On the one hand it gives a basic and illustrative presentation of the relevant topics without using many technical derivations. On the other hand many of the procedures are presented at a technically advanced level: for a thorough understanding, they are to be proven. In order to meet both requirements jointly, the present book is equipped with a lot of challenging problems at the end of each chapter as well as with the corresponding detailed solutions. Thus the virtual text - augmented with more than 60 basic examples and 40 illustrative figures - is rather easy to read while a part of the technical arguments is transferred to the exercise problems and their solutions.

This book presents modern developments in time series econometrics that are applied to macroeconomic and financial time series, bridging the gap between methods and realistic applications. It presents the most important approaches to the analysis of time series, which may be stationary or nonstationary. Modelling and forecasting univariate time series is the starting point. For multiple stationary time series, Granger causality tests and vector autogressive models are presented. As the modelling of nonstationary uni- or multivariate time series is most important for real applied work, unit root and cointegration analysis as well as vector error correction models are a central topic. Tools for analysing nonstationary data are then transferred to the panel framework. Modelling the (multivariate) volatility of financial time series with autogressive conditional heteroskedastic models is also treated.

In the world of e-commerce, security has quickly become of paramount importance. This unique book provides an in-depth understanding of basic security problems and relevant e-commerce solutions. From designing secure Web, e-commerce, and mobile commerce applications to securing internal networks to providing secure employee/user authentication, this cutting-edge book gives professionals the tools they need to solve their e-commerce security problems.

A selection of papers delivered at Chicon IV, including "Stephen King in Context," (Joseph F. Patrouch, Jr.); "Narcissism and Romance in McCaffrey's 'Restoree, '" (Mary T. Brizzi; "Harlan Ellison's Use of the Narrator's Voice" (Joseph F. Patrouch, Jr., more.