Environmental Injustice in the United States provides systematic insight into the social, economic, and political dynamics of environmental decision-making, and the impacts of those decisions on minority communities. The first part of the book examines closely the history of the environmental justice movement and the scholarly literature to date, with a discussion about how the issue made the public agenda in the first place. The second part of the book is a unique quantitative analysis of the relationship among race, class, political mobilization, and environmental harm at three levels-- state, county, and city. Despite the initial skepticism of the authors, their study finds both race and class to be significant variables in explaining patterns of environmental harm. The third part of the book then offers policy recommendations to decisionmakers, based on the book's findings. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2011, held in Vancouver, Canada, in November/December 2011. The 17 full papers, 14 short papers and 16 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 paper and poster submissions. In addition, the volume includes 6 workshops descriptions. The full and short papers have been organized into the following topical sections: interactive storytelling theory, new authoring modes, virtual characters and agents, story generation and drama managment, narratives in digital games, evaluation and user experience reports, tools for interactive storytelling.

"Environmental Injustice in the United States" provides systematic insight into the social, economic, and political dynamics of environmental decision-making, and the impacts of those decisions on minority communities. The first part of the book examines closely the history of the environmental justice movement and the scholarly literature to date, with a discussion about how the issue made the public agenda in the first place. The second part of the book is a unique quantitative analysis of the relationship among race, class, political mobilization, and environmental harm at three levels-- state, county, and city. Despite the initial skepticism of the authors, their study finds both race and class to be significant variables in explaining patterns of environmental harm. The third part of the book then offers policy recommendations to decisionmakers, based on the book's findings. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001.

Welcome to the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, which was held on September 1-3, 2008 in Tokyo, Japan. - telligent virtual agents (IVAs) are autonomous, graphically embodied agents in a virtual environment that are able to interact intelligently with human users, otherIVAs, andtheirenvironment. TheIVAconferenceseriesisthemajorannual meeting of the intelligent virtual agents community, attracting interdisciplinary minded researchers and practitioners from embodied cognitive modeling, art- cial intelligence, computer graphics, animation, virtual worlds, games, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. The origin of the IVA conferences dates from a successful workshop on - telligent Virtual Environments held in Brighton, UK, at the 13th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2008). This workshop was followed by a second one held in Salford in Manchester, UK in 1999. Subsequent events took place in Madrid, Spain in 2001, Irsee, Germany 2003 and Kos, Greece in 2005. Starting in 2006, IVA moved from being a biennial to an annual event and became a full-?edged international conference, held in Marina del Rey, Calif- nia, USA in 2006, and Paris, France in 2007. From 2005, IVA also hosted the Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents (GALA), an annual festival to showcase the latest animated lifelike agents created by university students and academic or industrial research groups. IVA 2008wasthe ?rsttime thatIVA wasorganizedinAsia andwearehappy to report that a large number of papers were submitted. IVA 2008 received 99 submissions from Europe, the Americas, and Asia

By autumn 1943 in Danton, Kentucky, the government has converted the small town's college into an Army Air Corps pre-preflight facility, the nearby state mental hospital into a treatment center for soldiers suffering battle-fatigue, and installs a satellite POW camp in the south end of town. Major Sam Ross, a fighter pilot shot down and badly wounded in Tunisia, arrives to take command of the school. Ross, also an excellent musician, has a chance encounter with a widowed schoolteacher with whom he falls in love but faces possible rejection because of her teenage son. Woven into the story are the accounts of an anti-Nazi German prisoner of war who, fearing for his life, escapes one POW camp and tries to get to the Danton POW facility; attempts to heal battle fatigue, especially a case involving a heinous crime perpetrated by German captors on a U.S. soldier later liberated; an itinerant evangelist gassed in France in WWI and his musically gifted wife; the wisdom of a one-legged, railroad-crossing watchman, a veteran of the Spanish-American War; the searching for meaning by a ministerial student; a night-club/big-band songstress; and how it was in small-town U.S.A. in the precise time-frame of autumn 1943.

By autumn 1943 in Danton, Kentucky, the government has converted the small town's college into an Army Air Corps pre-preflight facility, the nearby state mental hospital into a treatment center for soldiers suffering battle-fatigue, and installs a satellite POW camp in the south end of town. Major Sam Ross, a fighter pilot shot down and badly wounded in Tunisia, arrives to take command of the school. Ross, also an excellent musician, has a chance encounter with a widowed schoolteacher with whom he falls in love but faces possible rejection because of her teenage son. Woven into the story are the accounts of an anti-Nazi German prisoner of war who, fearing for his life, escapes one POW camp and tries to get to the Danton POW facility; attempts to heal battle fatigue, especially a case involving a heinous crime perpetrated by German captors on a U.S. soldier later liberated; an itinerant evangelist gassed in France in WWI and his musically gifted wife; the wisdom of a one-legged, railroad-crossing watchman, a veteran of the Spanish-American War; the searching for meaning by a ministerial student; a night-club/big-band songstress; and how it was in small-town U.S.A. in the precise time-frame of autumn 1943.

Art Tatum was the greatest virtuoso performer in the history of jazz piano; his technique overwhelmed almost every jazz player who heard him and caused classical virtuosos to take notice.

Through extensive interviews with Tatum's friends and fellow musicians, James Lester captures the complexities of this remarkable talent and the vibrant jazz world of the 1930s and 1940s in which he played.