This book draws a colorful and widespread picture of global affine hypersurface theory up to the most recent state. Moreover, the recent development revealed that affine differential geometry - as differential geometry in general - has an exciting intersection area with other fields of interest, like partial differential equations, global analysis, convex geometry and Riemann surfaces. The second edition of this monograph leads the reader from introductory concepts to recent research. Since the publication of the first edition in 1993 there appeared important new contributions, like the solutions of two different affine Bernstein conjectures, due to Chern and Calabi, respectively. Moreover, a large subclass of hyperbolic affine spheres were classified in recent years, namely the locally strongly convex Blaschke hypersurfaces that have parallel cubic form with respect to the Levi-Civita connection of the Blaschke metric. The authors of this book present such results and new methods of proof.

All papers appearing in this volume are original research articles and have not been published elsewhere. They meet the requirements that are necessary for publication in a good quality primary journal. E.Belchev, S.Hineva: On the minimal hypersurfaces of a locally symmetric manifold. -N.Blasic, N.Bokan, P.Gilkey: The spectral geometry of the Laplacian and the conformal Laplacian for manifolds with boundary. -J.Bolton, W.M.Oxbury, L.Vrancken, L.M. Woodward: Minimal immersions of RP2 into CPn. -W.Cieslak, A. Miernowski, W.Mozgawa: Isoptics of a strictly convex curve. -F.Dillen, L.Vrancken: Generalized Cayley surfaces. -A.Ferrandez, O.J.Garay, P.Lucas: On a certain class of conformally flat Euclidean hypersurfaces. -P.Gauduchon: Self-dual manifolds with non-negative Ricci operator. -B.Hajduk: On the obstruction group toexistence of Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature. -U.Hammenstaedt: Compact manifolds with 1/4-pinched negative curvature. -J.Jost, Xiaowei Peng: The geometry of moduli spaces of stable vector bundles over Riemannian surfaces. - O.Kowalski, F.Tricerri: A canonical connection for locally homogeneous Riemannian manifolds. -M.Kozlowski: Some improper affine spheres in A3. -R.Kusner: A maximum principle at infinity and the topology of complete embedded surfaces with constant mean curvature. -Anmin Li: Affine completeness and Euclidean completeness. -U.Lumiste: On submanifolds with parallel higher order fundamental form in Euclidean spaces. -A.Martinez, F.Milan: Convex affine surfaces with constant affine mean curvature. -M.Min-Oo, E.A.Ruh, P.Tondeur: Transversal curvature and tautness for Riemannian foliations. -S.Montiel, A.Ros: Schroedinger operators associated to a holomorphic map. -D.Motreanu: Generic existence of Morse functions on infinite dimensional Riemannian manifolds and applications. -B.Opozda: Some extensions of Radon's theorem.

All papers appearing in this volume are original research articles and have not been published elsewhere. They meet the requirements that are necessary for publication in a good quality primary journal. E.Belchev, S.Hineva: On the minimal hypersurfaces of a locally symmetric manifold. -N.Blasic, N.Bokan, P.Gilkey: The spectral geometry of the Laplacian and the conformal Laplacian for manifolds with boundary. -J.Bolton, W.M.Oxbury, L.Vrancken, L.M. Woodward: Minimal immersions of RP2 into CPn. -W.Cieslak, A. Miernowski, W.Mozgawa: Isoptics of a strictly convex curve. -F.Dillen, L.Vrancken: Generalized Cayley surfaces. -A.Ferrandez, O.J.Garay, P.Lucas: On a certain class of conformally flat Euclidean hypersurfaces. -P.Gauduchon: Self-dual manifolds with non-negative Ricci operator. -B.Hajduk: On the obstruction group toexistence of Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature. -U.Hammenstaedt: Compact manifolds with 1/4-pinched negative curvature. -J.Jost, Xiaowei Peng: The geometry of moduli spaces of stable vector bundles over Riemannian surfaces. - O.Kowalski, F.Tricerri: A canonical connection for locally homogeneous Riemannian manifolds. -M.Kozlowski: Some improper affine spheres in A3. -R.Kusner: A maximum principle at infinity and the topology of complete embedded surfaces with constant mean curvature. -Anmin Li: Affine completeness and Euclidean completeness. -U.Lumiste: On submanifolds with parallel higher order fundamental form in Euclidean spaces. -A.Martinez, F.Milan: Convex affine surfaces with constant affine mean curvature. -M.Min-Oo, E.A.Ruh, P.Tondeur: Transversal curvature and tautness for Riemannian foliations. -S.Montiel, A.Ros: Schroedinger operators associated to a holomorphic map. -D.Motreanu: Generic existence of Morse functions on infinite dimensional Riemannian manifolds and applications. -B.Opozda: Some extensions of Radon's theorem.

Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, an interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict, is multi-authored. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"