Books on the topic 'Intramolecular interactions through space'

As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium - and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.

A key objective of the modern development of society is the observance of ecological and socio-economic unity in human life and comprehensive improvement of environment and quality of life should be considered in close connection with the quality of the natural landscape. The formation of scientific understanding of the unity of society and nature is driven by the need for practical implementation of such unity. This defines the focus of this monograph. Given the overall assessment of the current state of the environment in Azerbaijan, considers the scenarios for the future development of the area. The prospects of the use of biotechnology in integrated environmental protection. In the framework of the above to address complex social, environmental and production problems in Azerbaijan developed scientific basis of integrated system of industrial farms — biclusters with a closed production cycle through effective utilization of regional biological resources, whose interactions and relationships take on the character of vzaimodeistvie components for obtaining focused final result with high practical importance. Microbiological, biochemical and technological processes are the basis of all development of biotechnology. Presents the development will help strengthen the ties between science and production, establishing mechanisms to conduct applied research in the field of innovation and creation of knowledge-based technologies in solving current and future environmental problems in Azerbaijan. We offer innovative ideas distinguishes the potential need for their materialization into new products, technologies and services, including the widespread use of digital technologies to design dynamic digital environmental map in space and in time. For students, scientific and engineering-technical workers, students and specializing in environmental technology, environmental protection.

This volume chronicles the development of philosophical conceptions of space from early antiquity through the medieval period to the early modern era, ending with Kant. The chapters describe the interactions between philosophy at different moments in history and various other disciplines, especially geometry, optics, and natural science more generally. Figures from the history of mathematics, science, and philosophy are discussed, including Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Proclus, Ibn al-Haytham, Nicole Oresme, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant. A series of shorter essays, or Reflections, characterize perspectives on space found in the disciplines of ecology, mathematics, sculpture, neuroscience, cultural geography, art history, and the history of science.

This chapter draws together theoretical and methodological threads from the rest of the book while proposing a broader analytical model, in which various tonal styles—not only pantriadicism—interact. This model is based on a conception of triadic tonality space in which three paradigmatic axes (diatonicity, centricity, and functionality) create numerous distinct and modifiable tonal styles. These distinct styles are shown to harbor persistent associations in mainstream film music. It is argued that wondrous harmony often involves motion through triadic tonality space. A cinematically well-established example of this is the chromatically modulating cadence (CMC); the role of cadences in general for organizing film time is emphasized. The dialectic between tonal idioms has been mined for its connotative power by composers wishing to portray the various wondrous affects, and a variety of examples drawn from films that dramatize the “beatific sublime” are investigated, concluding with Alfred Newman’s The Song of Bernadette.

As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium – and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.

This chapter highlights negotiations of meanings a Western church worker encountered in a Chadian congregation. For many mainline churches, “missions agencies,” focused on proselytization, are not the sole or even primary mode of outreach; “development agencies,” focused on local economic and social development, complement them. These two types of agencies are tied, through institutional memories in Western and African churches, to the cultural, including musical, practices of missions. The chapter retells the story of a Western development worker who frames her role as “learner” but finds she is understood as missionary “teacher” and is asked to teach and not learn music. Music is a persistent indicator of a history of missionary interactions between Chadian and Western Christians that lends meanings to and constrains present-day transnational interactions between them; it can provide a shared space of practice that is not contiguous with the “meanings” of the music under discussion.

This chapter considers the research project as a temporary, liminal community, always at risk of dispersal from external incentives and internal frustrations. Participant commitment can be sustained through the traditional mechanism of ritual, while intellectual insight advances in play; junior researchers can animate both modes of sociability and achieve influence thereby. Shared space and shared time coordinate planned interactions and also facilitate spontaneous emergences. Examples from the Göttingen Interdisciplinary Working Group on Cultural Property illustrate the intellectual payoffs of coffee machines, dancing, visual project mapping, and writing the grant renewal application as exercises in social as well as intellectual coordination. In the middle stages of research, a tolerance for conceptual ambiguity at the project level can facilitate lower-level successes and interactions.

This chapter discusses the laws of relativistic dynamics for continuous media, namely, the ‘fields’ that mediate interactions in relativistic theories, and also fluids. The concept of field introduced by Faraday and formalized by Maxwell lies at the heart of contemporary physics. The intuitive idea behind this concept is, on the one hand, that massive bodies, owing to their internal constitution, impregnate space with what are called ‘fields’, potential entities which are only revealed by the presence of other bodies possessing the same type of charge. On the other hand, there is the idea that the interactions between these bodies, which determine their motion, are effected through the intermediary of these fields. This physical concept of a field is represented mathematically by one or several functions of points p in Minkowski spacetime.

The introduction considers how the permanent iconography of the andron interacts with the performances and prescribed movements of the symposium, and it sets up the book’s theoretical foundation, which incorporates discourses in the anthropology and sociology of space and the cultural role of metaphor. It also briefly describes the andron as the setting for the symposium, as well as the significance that the symposium held as a departure from quotidian existence. Further, the introduction lays out the central thesis of the book, which argues that these various interactions between space, imagery, and experience facilitate the imagining of the symposium as a metaphor for other kinds of movement, including travel over the world, rhythmic circularity, and travel through time.

Communication technologies, including the Internet, social media, and countless online applications, create the infrastructure and interface through which many of our interactions take place today. This form of networked communication creates new questions about how we establish relationships, engage in public, build a sense of identity, and delimit the private domain. Digital technologies have also enabled new ways of observing the world; many of our daily interactions leave a digital trail that, if followed, can help us unravel the rhythms of social life and the complexity of the world we inhabit, including dynamics of change. The analysis of digital data requires partnerships across disciplinary boundaries that–although on the rise–are still uncommon. Social scientists, computer scientists, network scientists, and others have never been closer to their goal of trying to understand communication dynamics, but there are not many venues in which they can engage in an open exchange of methods and theoretical insights. This book opens that space and creates a platform to integrate the knowledge produced in different academic silos so that we can address the big puzzles that beat at the heart of social life in this networked age.

People are making music at their leisure and publishing it online. YouTube has provided a space for musicians to publish multitrack music videos, join collective musical ensembles, and collaboratively perform with others. This chapter explores three trends of how musicians are creating music videos and forming virtual ensembles and music making communities: they are showing off their skills through music videos; they are creating videos to join large collective multitrack ensembles of hundreds or even thousands of others; and they are actively collaborating with small groups to create mediated performances. Collective and collaborative music making on the Internet are not only happening among grassroots amateur musicians, but also through educational and commercial institutions. Music making on the Internet allows for global interactions and collaboration, where people come together and enjoy music recreationally, unbound by time and space.

Human interventions with living entities have had to be in a constant state of negotiating space necessary for co-habitation with animals, birds, trees, plants, grasslands, forests, hills, water bodies in the creation of villages and other settlements. The book argues that negotiating this space meant sharing, which impacted economic strategies, religious experiences, cultural interactions and oral performances that humans have strategized and preserved. This intersectional theme, through individual case studies, ultimately provides us the civilizational ethos of the Indian sub-continent on how human non-human relations informed it. The book provides a window on how this relationship was represented in a variety of material and literary texts, visual representations, archival records, folklore and oral testimonies. It brings to the fore these narratives over the longue durée to explicate the complex and delicate relationships in region specific ecological settings and thus give readers a perspective that crosses disciplinary and conceptual boundaries.

St Paul’s Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Spatial Practices is a study of London’s cathedral, its immediate surroundings, and its everyday users in early modern literary and historical documents and images, with a special emphasis on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Hentschell discusses representations of several of the seemingly discrete spaces of the precinct to reveal how these spaces overlap with and inform one another spatially. She argues that specific locations—including the Paul’s nave (also known as Paul’s Walk), Paul’s Cross pulpit, the bookshops of Paul’s Churchyard, the College of the Minor Canons, Paul’s School, the performance space for the Children of Paul’s, and the fabric of the cathedral itself—should be seen as mutually constitutive and in a dynamic, ever-evolving state. To support this argument, she attends closely to the varied uses of the precinct, including the embodied spatial practices of early modern Londoners and visitors, who moved through the precinct, paused to visit its sacred and secular spaces, and/or resided there. This includes the walkers in the nave, sermon-goers, those who shopped for books, the residents of the precinct, the choristers—who were also schoolboys and actors—and those who were devoted to church repairs and renovations. By attending to the interactions between place and people and to the multiple stories these interactions tell—Hentschell attempts to animate St Paul’s and deepen our understanding of the cathedral and precinct in the early modern period.

This chapter proposes a new approach for addressing the question of genre, setting aside the long-reigning realist, taxonomic understanding in biblical scholarship. To understand the complex process through which they develop, this chapter builds on recent insights from the study of intertextuality, networks, emergence, and conceptual blending. It then re-envisions them as constellations in three-dimensional space, which gain their significance from the cultural perspectives from which they are viewed. As readers view texts from different perspectives, they notice different similarities between them that have a particular cultural resonance. Any given text may contribute to multiple genres, and only through recognizing those multiple genres, viewing the text’s interactions with others from multiple perspectives, is its full meaning, its true location in the vast textual network, evident. This also addresses several tensions at the heart of genre theory.

Perception may be defined as the cognitive process that lets us know what is out there, based on incoming sensory signals. Standard textbook accounts often emphasize five modular ‘senses’ encoding such signals. In the perspective presented in this book, instead, perception is inherently multisensory and linked to exploratory action. Perceptual processes do not merely encode incoming sensory signals, they actively explore the environment, seeking informative stimulation from potential multisensory sources and they combine available signals through several multisensory interactions. Studying perception within a multisensory, rather than modular perspective, requires a systemic approach, and this book illustrates how this notion can be successfully applied to eight domains of perception in natural conditions: knowing our own body, controlling its movements, perceiving inanimate objects, perceiving edible objects, understanding the intriguing phenomenon known as synaesthesia, attending to objects in multisensory conditions, perceiving space, and perceiving time.

This is a book about the multiple worlds that Herodotus creates in his narrative. The constructed landscape in Herodotus’ work incorporates his literary representation of the natural world from the broadest scope of continents right down to the location of specific episodes. His ‘charging’ of those settings through mythological associations and spatial parallels adds further depth and resonance. The physical world of the Histories is in turn altered by characters in the narrative whose interactions with the natural world form part of Herodotus’ inquiry, and add another dimension to the meaning given to space, combining notions of landscape as physical reality and as constructed reality. Geographical space is not a neutral backdrop, nor simply to be seen as Herodotus’ ‘creation’, but it is brought to life as a player in the narrative, the interaction with which reinforces the positive or negative characterizations of the protagonists. Analysis of focalization is embedded in this study of Herodotean geography in two ways—firstly, in the configurations of space contributed by different viewpoints on the world; and secondly, in the opinions about human interaction with geographical space which emerge from different narrative voices. The multivocal nature of the narrative complicates whether we can identify a single ‘Herodotean’ world, still less one containing consistent moral judgements. Furthermore, the mutability of fortune renders impossible a static Herodotean world, as successive imperial powers emerge. The exercise of political power, manifested metaphorically and literally through control over the natural world, generates a constantly evolving map of imperial geography.

This chapter investigates how and why amateur musicians use social networking sites, employing a mixed-methods approach. Attention is focused on four big Italian Facebook communities of pop-rock musicians: drums, bass, guitar, and keyboard players (overall, 2,101 active users), analyzing the relational and textual data extracted from the web. The chapter analyzes the network structures emerging from the interactions among the users. It also identifies and maps the main areas of discussion (sound shaping, studio recording, marketplace, musical references, computer production, and relations) and the latent semantic dimension characterizing Facebook users’ activities, through social network analysis and lexical correspondence analysis. Meanings, values, aesthetics, and representations of amateur music making, emerging from the data, are framed within two orthogonal dimensions: theory versus praxis, and competence versus music production. The Italian singularity is then explained with respect to this space. Some theoretical conclusions are finally drawn.

Systematic social observation (SSO) is the application of rigorous, replicable, and generalizable approaches from survey methodology to field observation (ethnography). SSO provides researchers with independent, robust, and quantifiable data about the forms of social interactions most commonly obtained through qualitative inquiry. This chapter begins with a general overview of the SSO approach. Section 14.3 describes the application of SSO approaches to environmental settings. Section 14.4 discusses the ecometric approach first proposed by Raudenbush and Sampson (1999), demonstrating how the science of SSO and the science of ecological analysis were intimately related. Finally, section 14.5 discusses current developments in SSO for environmental analysis. It focuses on three areas: interviewer observational data routinely collected as part of larger social surveys; participant-generated observations using space–time budgets; and Google Street View as a repository for environmental audit data. Developments in crowdsourced SSO data like Mapilliary are also briefly discussed.

Introduction to Modern Dynamics: Chaos, Networks, Space and Time (2nd Edition) combines the topics of modern dynamics—chaos theory, dynamics on complex networks and the geometry of dynamical spaces—into a coherent framework. This text is divided into four parts: Geometric Mechanics, Nonlinear Dynamics, Complex Systems, and Relativity. These topics share a common and simple mathematical language that helps students gain a unified physical intuition. Geometric mechanics lays the foundation and sets the tone for the rest of the book by emphasizing dynamical spaces, like state space and phase space, whose geometric properties define the set of all trajectories through those spaces. The section on nonlinear dynamics has chapters on chaos theory, synchronization, and networks. Chaos theory provides the language and tools to understand nonlinear systems, introducing fixed points that are classified through stability analysis and nullclines that shepherd system trajectories. Synchronization and networks are central paradigms in this book because they demonstrate how collective behavior emerges from the interactions of many individual nonlinear elements. The section on complex systems contains chapters on neural dynamics, evolutionary dynamics, and economic dynamics. The final section contains chapters on metric spaces and the special and general theories of relativity. In the second edition, sections on conventional topics, like applications of Lagrangians, have been strengthened, as well as being updated to provide a modern perspective. Several of the introductory chapters have been rearranged for improved logical flow and there are expanded homework problems at the end of each chapter.

This chapter explores how principles underlying natural evo-devo (evolution and development) continue to inspire the design of artificial systems from models of cell growth through to simulated three-dimensional evolved creatures. Research on biological evolvability shows that phenotypic outcomes depend on multiple interactions across different organizational levels—the adult organism is the outcome of a series of genetic cascades modulated in time and space by the wider embryological, bodily, and environmental context. This chapter reviews evo-devo principles discovered in biology and explores their potential for improving the evolvability of artificial systems. Biological topics covered include adaptive, selective, and generative mechanisms, and the role of epigenetic processes in creating phenotypic diversity. Modeling approaches include L-systems, Boolean networks, reaction-diffusion processes, genetic algorithms, and artificial embryogeny. A particular focus is on the evolution and development of the mammalian brain and the possibility of designing, using synthetic evo-devo approaches, brain-like control architectures for biomimetic robots.

The relationship between humans and dogs has garnered considerable attention within archaeological research around the world. Investigations into the lived experiences of domestic dogs have proven to be an intellectually productive avenue for better understanding humanity in the past. This book examines the human-canine connection by moving beyond asking when, why, or how the dog was domesticated. While these questions are fundamental, beyond them lies a rich and textured history of humans maintaining a bond with another species through cooperation and companionship over thousands of years. Diverse techniques and theoretical approaches are used by authors in this volume to investigate the many ways dogs were conceptualized by their human counterparts in terms of both their value and social standing within a variety of human cultures across space and time. In this way, this book contributes a better understanding of the human-canine bond while also participating in broader anthropological discussions about how human interactions with domesticated animals shape their practices and worldviews.

Sculpture is an artistic practice that involves material, three-dimensional, and generally static objects, whereas cinema produces immaterial, two-dimensional, kinetic images. These differences are the basis for a range of magical, mystical and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. Sculpture motivates cinematic movement and film makes manifest the durational properties of sculptural space. This book will examine key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through seven chapters and an extensive reference gallery, dealing with the transformation skills of "cinemagician" Georges Méliès, the experimental art documentaries of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Henri Alekan, the statuary metaphors of modernist cinema, the mythological living statues of the peplum genre, and contemporary art practices in which film—as material and apparatus—is used as sculptural medium. The book’s broad scope and interdisciplinary approach is sure to interest scholars, amateurs and students alike.

Spanning chronologically from the third millennium BCE through to the seventh century CE and beyond, and geographically from the Mediterranean to the Near East and Asia, this book explores the earliest known evidence of familiar folk tales and fairy tales in the ancient world. Drawing on sources including the Rig Veda, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, the Westcar Papyrus, and the Odyssey, this volume ranges from epic poetry to drama, to fables and proverbs, and from ancient histories to novels. Scholars in Classics, Anthropology, Folklore, and Asian Studies examine the dissemination, adaptation, and cross-cultural interactions of early forms of folk tales, providing new insights into how they functioned and circulated across different societies. An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of literature, history, and cultural studies, contributors explore themes including: forms of the marvelous, adaption, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, space, socialization, and power.

This chapter looks at the emergence of accordion schools and accordion bands in the United States established by Italian Americans. Approaching the subject from the perspective of grassroots oral history and performance theory, it maps the ways in which the efforts of Roxy and Nellie Caccamise (pioneers of the piano accordion in upstate New York) were connected to a longer history and larger matrix of Italian American musicians, composers, publishing houses, and manufacturers in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. The chapter also suggests how the interactions and interplay of peoples within, and through, these community-based networks functioned to create a parallel economy and a cultural space that was not only imbricated in the politics of identity but helped span gaps between folk and fame. Taking an actor/action-centered approach to life-history narratives, it suggests that the accordion schools created by Italian Americans operated through the interstices of two cultures and proved to be a strategic intervention in American cultural life with polysemous meanings.

What is a moving image, and how does it move us? In Thinking In Film, celebrated theorist Mieke Bal engages in an exploration - part dialogue, part voyage - with the video installations of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila to understand movement as artistic practice and as affect. Through fifteen years of Ahtila's practice, including such seminal works as The Annunciation, Where Is Where? and The House, Bal searches for the places where theoretical and artistic practices intersect, to create radical spaces in which genuinely democratic acts are performed. Bringing together different understandings of 'figure' from form to character, Bal examines the syntax of the exhibition and its ability to bring together installations, the work itself, the physical and ontological thresholds of the installation space and the use of narrative and genre. The double meaning of 'movement', in Bal's unique thought, catalyses anunderstanding of video installation work as inherently plural, heterogenous and possessed of revolutionary political potential. The video image as an art form illuminates the question of what an image is, and the installation binds viewers to their own interactions with the space. In this context Bal argues that the intersection between movement and space creates an openness to difference and doubt. By 'thinking in' art, we find ideas not illustrated by but actualized in artworks. Bal practices this theory in action to demonstrate how the video installation can move us to think beyond ordinary boundaries and venture into new spaces. There is no act more radical than figuring a vision of the 'other' as film allows artto do. Thinking In Film is Mieke Bal ather incisive, innovative best as she opens up the miraculous political potential of the condensed art of the moving image.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the history of Germany by investigating the origins and impact of the ‘communications revolution’ that transformed state and society during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon the period 1830–80, exploring the interactions between the many different actors who developed, administered, and used one of the most important technologies of the period—the electric telegraph. Drawing upon evidence from Prussia, Bavaria, Bremen, and a number of towns across Central Europe, it reveals the channels through which knowledge circulated across the region, stimulating both collaboration and confrontation between the scientists, technicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats involved in bringing the telegraph to life. It highlights the technology’s impact upon the conduct of trade, finance, news distribution, and government in the tumultuous decades that witnessed the 1848 revolutions, the wars of unification, and the establishment of the Kaiserreich in 1871. Following the telegraph lines themselves, it weaves together the changes which took place at a local, regional, national, and eventually global level, revisiting the technology’s impact upon concepts of space and time, and highlighting the importance of this period in laying the foundations for Germany’s experience of a profoundly ambiguous, networked modernity.

This volume is the editorial product of the project “Gentrification and Crime. New Configurations and Challenges for the City” started by a public conference held on May 6, 2019 at the Municipal Historical Archive of Palermo. This event was organized by Locus and endorsed by private and public bodies. During the conference, four presentations were given by distinguished academics of main fields investigated: Giovanni Semi, Marco Picone, Adam Asmundo, Antonio La Spina. Journalist Elvira Terranova moderated the event. This publication was born from the desire to investigate gentrification and crime through a multidisciplinary approach. It draws inspiration from the urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre and his fundamental work The Production of Space on how the subject in its corporeality and in its interactions with the other integrates and produces spaces. The people involved in the project stem from different fields: geographers, urban sociologists and criminologists, architects and urban planners, historians, and other representatives of civil society. That being said, given this project’s cross-disciplinary nature, contributors are given some creative freedom to flesh-out their own conceptualizations. As such, it is appropriate to cultivate an understanding of the intellectual framework and foundation underpinning this work.

The discipline of geography is built around four key concepts—environment, place, space, and scale—that form a matrix for exploring and appreciating many aspects of contemporary society. The environment is the ultimate source of human sustenance; people have created places to realize that potential; and a spatial structure—nodes, routes, surfaces and bounded territories—has been erected within which human interactions are organised.The relationships between human societies and their environments—now very much changed from their pre-human “natural” state—involve competition for and conflicts over resources, of increasing intensity. Resolution of all but the smallest scale of those conflicts requires a body that is independent of the actors involved and can ensure that agreements are reached and then implemented. Such a body is the state, a territorially bounded apparatus that, through the operation of territoriality strategies, can ensure conflict resolution among its citizenry and thereby resolve environmental problems.Many of those problems—the most severe being global climate change resulting from anthropomorphically induced global warming—are not contained, and cannot be contained, within an individual state’s territory, however. Tackling them requires inter-state co-operation, at a global scale, but the absence of a super-national body with the power to require actions by individual states is a major constraint to problem resolution.

Save the Womanhood examines twentieth-century anxieties about promiscuity and prostitution, and the efforts of social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. Offering an historical analysis of concerns about women’s interactions with urban space beyond London, the book notes that the pioneering work of women philanthropists and women police patrollers in Liverpool often ran counter to the ambitions and liberties of other women who travelled through the city in search of work and adventure. National debates about the efficacy of solicitation laws, fears about ‘white slavery’ and concerns about changing sexual practices and new consumer cultures gave women street patrollers in Liverpool greater opportunity to justify their own forms of ‘respectable’ public womanhood. For much of the twentieth century, these women patrollers networked with other agencies to enact a powerful form of moral surveillance on the streets. Yet the book also notes that the post-war decline of social purity organizations did not mean that their ideas about the need to monitor female morality went away. The book argues that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. As such, this is a history that also speaks to contemporary debates about the criminalization of sex workers by showing how laws against solicitation have been historically intertwined with moral judgement of women’s sexual practices.

This book chronicles the history of Women’s Artistic Gymnastics against the backdrop of the Cold War. Accepted into the Olympic program in 1952 because it was considered uniquely appropriate for women, the sport has always been defined by the performance of femininity. Eastern bloc governments harnessed the nonthreatening nature of gymnasts to advance their political ambitions through citizen diplomacy. Yet at the same time, they were accused of flouting the amateur rule. But this was not the only rule being broken. Some also cheated by score fixing and later, age falsification. The sport became notorious for its young athletes. Their youth contributed to a power imbalance with their coaches, creating the conditions for abuse. Gymnastics was once at the forefront of women’s sport. But can a sport facing these issues, designed to promote a narrow view of gender, really be feminist? In exploring these topics, this book shows how gymnastics became a part of the cultural battlefield for Cold War supremacy. But gymnastics was not only a space for challenge. It also provided moments of international collaboration: between the international gymnastics federation and the International Olympic Committee, between gymnasts, coaches, officials, fans, and even politicians. This book argues that these global interactions charged the transformation of the sport throughout the twentieth century. It offers new insights into how sport transmits and perpetuates social ideals and the role sports, and their governing bodies, play in international relations. And with this knowledge, it suggests how women’s gymnastics might once again become the empowering, feminist experience it once was.

Founded as a military encampment in 1525, abandoned, and refounded in 1528 as an early Spanish colonial town, the town of San Salvador had an indigenous population perhaps twenty times greater in number than its Spanish population. Abandoned 1545-60, its brief occupation spans the crucial years of the early colonial period in Central America. The well-preserved ruins of this town, known today as the site of Ciudad Vieja, afford a rare opportunity for archaeological study of the dynamics of early Spanish-indigenous interaction and entanglement. Approximately two dozen Spanish cities were founded in Central America during the early colonial period. Few have been investigated archaeologically, and Ciudad Vieja is unique among them for its integrity, preservation, visibility, and accessibility. The landscapes of these urban settlements formed the spatial matrices within which their inhabitants embodied the habitus of social and physical relations of their lives, structuring social encounters through the production and reproduction of social relationships. Their habitus and relationships were products of actions crystallized at prescribed places and materialized in the plans, layouts, architecture, and material culture objects of the towns. The present book emphasizes a modern-world archaeological approach featuring detailed spatial analysis of the town, viewing it as an urban landscape and emphasizing the mutual interactions of the individuals and different cultural groups that shared the urban space. The study is set within a dialectical historical framework for the development of urbanism in medieval and early modern Spain and the early Spanish colonial Caribbean and Central America.

Privilege at Play is a book about inequalities, social hierarchies, and privilege in contemporary Mexico. Based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, the book focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege. This study makes use of rich qualitative data to demonstrate how social hierarchies are relations reproduced through a multitude of everyday practices. The vast disparities between club members and workers, for example, are built on traditional class indicators, such as wealth, and on more subtle expressions of class, such as notions of fashion, sense of humor, perceptions about competition, and everyday oral interactions. The book incorporates race and gender perspectives into the study of inequalities, illustrating the multilayer condition of privilege. Although Mexicans commonly attributed racial relations a marginal role in the continuation of inequities, the book explains how affluent individuals frequently express racialized ideas to describe and justify the impoverished condition of workers. In doing so, Privilege at Play demonstrates the necessity of considering the role of racialized dynamics when studying social inequalities in Mexico. An analysis of gender relations shows how men maintain a dominant position over their fellow female golfers despite the similar upper-class origins of both male and female golf club members. This book pays particular attention to the spatial dynamics that reinforce social inequalities, arguing that the apparent triviality of space makes it a highly effective way to mark social inequalities and, hence, emphasize privilege.

The climate system consists of interactions between physical, biological, chemical, and human processes across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Characterizing the behavior of components of this system is crucial for scientists and decision makers. There is substantial uncertainty associated with observations of this system as well as our understanding of various system components and their interaction. Thus, inference and prediction in climate science should accommodate uncertainty in order to facilitate the decision-making process. Statistical science is designed to provide the tools to perform inference and prediction in the presence of uncertainty. In particular, the field of spatial statistics considers inference and prediction for uncertain processes that exhibit dependence in space and/or time. Traditionally, this is done descriptively through the characterization of the first two moments of the process, one expressing the mean structure and one accounting for dependence through covariability.Historically, there are three primary areas of methodological development in spatial statistics: geostatistics, which considers processes that vary continuously over space; areal or lattice processes, which considers processes that are defined on a countable discrete domain (e.g., political units); and, spatial point patterns (or point processes), which consider the locations of events in space to be a random process. All of these methods have been used in the climate sciences, but the most prominent has been the geostatistical methodology. This methodology was simultaneously discovered in geology and in meteorology and provides a way to do optimal prediction (interpolation) in space and can facilitate parameter inference for spatial data. These methods rely strongly on Gaussian process theory, which is increasingly of interest in machine learning. These methods are common in the spatial statistics literature, but much development is still being done in the area to accommodate more complex processes and “big data” applications. Newer approaches are based on restricting models to neighbor-based representations or reformulating the random spatial process in terms of a basis expansion. There are many computational and flexibility advantages to these approaches, depending on the specific implementation. Complexity is also increasingly being accommodated through the use of the hierarchical modeling paradigm, which provides a probabilistically consistent way to decompose the data, process, and parameters corresponding to the spatial or spatio-temporal process.Perhaps the biggest challenge in modern applications of spatial and spatio-temporal statistics is to develop methods that are flexible yet can account for the complex dependencies between and across processes, account for uncertainty in all aspects of the problem, and still be computationally tractable. These are daunting challenges, yet it is a very active area of research, and new solutions are constantly being developed. New methods are also being rapidly developed in the machine learning community, and these methods are increasingly more applicable to dependent processes. The interaction and cross-fertilization between the machine learning and spatial statistics community is growing, which will likely lead to a new generation of spatial statistical methods that are applicable to climate science.

The International Conference on Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Equality and Diversity in Sports (ICMPEDS) is organized by GESPORT with the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union from the 14th to the 16th of July 2021. The conference is an excellent forum for academics, researchers, practitioners, athletes, man- agers and professionals of federations, associations and sport organizations, and those other- wise involved in sport to share and exchange ideas in different areas of sport related equality worldwide. We will keep you informed by email and post the latest information on this matter on the GESPORT website and social media. Sport and its management continues to be a field where men and masculinity strongly prevail. This conference aims to investigate the complexities attached to the following questions: What does gender openness mean in the context of sport in the 21st century? What persists as gen- der closure in the same context? What are the gender cultures that signify sport continuing to be defined by regimes that resort to a dominant masculinity embodied in a strong and athletic male body? Moreover, and albeit some exceptions, athletes, practitioners, decision and policy makers, and sports spectators are predominantly men. In this sense, gender discrimination and segregation are present in multiple aspects of sport. Some illustrations include: a) male athletes have high salaries, more career opportunities, and get more recognition by society than female athletes; b) management and leadership positions in sports organizations are mainly occupied by men, including in sports traditionally considered as feminine and which have become feminised (e.g. gymnastics and dance); c) masculinised sports and its male athletes have much more attention and recognition from the media than female athletes; d) sports journalism continues to be predominantly produced and managed by men; e) some sports spectatorships cultures are marked by rituals and interactions that resort to masculine tribalism, often leading to aggressive and violent behaviours. Gender discrimination in sport is somehow socially normalised and accepted through a dis- course that essentialises the embodied sexual differences between genders. This gender dis- course legitimises the exclusion of women in some sports modalities and traps female bodies in sociocultural constructions as less able to exercise and engage in sport, or as the second and weaker version of the ideal masculine body. However, there are signs that the context of sport may be changing. The European Union and some national governments have made an effort to promote gender equality and diversity by fostering the adoption of gender equality codes/policies in different modalities and in in- ternational and local sports organizations. These new policies aim to increase female partic- ipation and recognition in sport, their access to leadership positions and involvement in the decision-making in sport structures. Additionally, the number of women practising non-com- petitive sport and as sports spectators have started growing, leading to new representations of sport and challenging the role of women in such a context. Finally, different body constructions and the emergence of alternative embodied femininities and masculinities are also challeng- ing how athletes of both genders experience their bodies and sports practice. Yet, research is scarce about the impact of these changes/challenges in the sports context. This conference will focus on mapping gender relations in sport and its management by taking into account the different modalities, contexts, institutional policies, organizational structures and actors (e.g. athletes, spectators, media professionals, sport decision makers and man- agers). It will treat sport and its management as one avenue where gender segregation and inequality occurs, but also adopt such as a space that presents an opportunity for change and does so as a widely applicable topic whose traits and culture are reflected in organizations and work more broadly. In this sense, the conference is interested in theoretical and empirical research work that may explore, but are not limited to the following issues: • Women representativeness in sports modalities and in sport organizational structures in different countries; • Women and management accounting in sport organizations; • The gender regimes that (re)produce different sports policies, modalities, and institu- tions in sport; • The stories of resistance/conformity of women that already occupy different roles in sport contexts; • The challenges and impact of conventional and new body representations in sports institutions and including athletes of both genders; • The discourses of masculinities in sport and its effect on women and men athletes; • The emergence of nationalism and populist discourses in political and governments states and their impact on the (re)shaping of masculinity and femininity constructions in sport; • The gendered transformations of the spectators’ gaze in what concerns different sports modalities; • The effects of new groups of sports spectators on gender relations in sport; • The discourses in media and its participation in the sports gender (in)equality; • The impact of new technologies, and new practices of training/coaching in the body- work and identities of athletes of both genders.

Economy and mankind are inextricably interlinked. Just as the economy or the production of material wealth is unimaginable without a man, so human existence and development are impossible without the wealth created in the economy. Shortly, both the goal and the means of achieving and realization of the economy are still the human resources. People have long ago noticed that it was the economy that created livelihoods, and the delays in their production led to the catastrophic events such as hunger, poverty, civil wars, social upheavals, revolutions, moral degeneration, and more. Therefore, the special interest of people in understanding the regulatory framework of the functioning of the economy has existed and exists in all historical epochs [A. Sisvadze. Economic theory. Part One. 2006y. p. 22]. The system of economic disciplines studies economy or economic activities of a society. All of them are based on science, which is currently called economic theory in the post-socialist space (the science of economics, the principles of economics or modern economics), and in most countries of the world - predominantly in the Greek-Latin manner - economics. The title of the present book is also Modern Economics. Economics (economic theory) is the science that studies the efficient use of limited resources to produce and distribute goods and services in order to satisfy as much as possible the unlimited needs and demands of the society. More simply, economics is the science of choice and how society manages its limited resources. Moreover, it should be emphasized that economics (economic theory) studies only the distribution, exchange and consumption of the economic wealth (food, beverages, clothing, housing, machine tools, computers, services, etc.), the production of which is possible and limited. And the wealth that exists indefinitely: no economic relations are formed in the production and distribution of solar energy, air, and the like. This current book is the second complete updated edition of the challenges of the modern global economy in the context of the coronary crisis, taking into account some of the priority directions of the country's development. Its purpose is to help students and interested readers gain a thorough knowledge of economics and show them how this knowledge can be applied pragmatically (professionally) in professional activities or in everyday life. To achieve this goal, this textbook, which consists of two parts and tests, discusses in simple and clear language issues such as: the essence of economics as a science, reasons for origin, purpose, tasks, usefulness and functions; Basic principles, problems and peculiarities of economics in different economic systems; Needs and demand, the essence of economic resources, types and limitations; Interaction, mobility, interchangeability and efficient use of economic resources. The essence and types of wealth; The essence, types and models of the economic system; The interaction of households and firms in the market of resources and products; Market mechanism and its elements - demand, supply and price; Demand and supply elasticity; Production costs and the ways to reduce them; Forms of the market - perfect and incomplete competition markets and their peculiarities; Markets for Production Factors and factor incomes; The essence of macroeconomics, causes and importance of origin; The essence and calculation of key macroeconomic indicators (gross national product, gross domestic product, net national product, national income, etc.); Macroeconomic stability and instability, unemployment, inflation and anti-inflationary policies; State regulation of the economy and economic policy; Monetary and fiscal policy; Income and standard of living; Economic Growth; The Corona Pandemic as a Defect and Effect of Globalization; National Economic Problems and New Opportunities for Development in the conditions of the Coronary Crisis; The Socio-economic problems of moral obsolescence in digital technologies; Education and creativity are the main solution way to overcome the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus; Positive and negative effects of tourism in Georgia; Formation of the middle class as a contributing factor to the development of tourism in Georgia; Corporate culture in Georgian travel companies, etc. The axiomatic truth is that economics is the union of people in constant interaction. Given that the behavior of the economy reflects the behavior of the people who make up the economy, after clarifying the essence of the economy, we move on to the analysis of the four principles of individual decision-making. Furtermore, the book describes how people make independent decisions. The key to making an individual decision is that people have to choose from alternative options, that the value of any action is measured by the value of what must be given or what must be given up to get something, that the rational, smart people make decisions based on the comparison of the marginal costs and marginal returns (benefits), and that people behave accordingly to stimuli. Afterwards, the need for human interaction is then analyzed and substantiated. If a person is isolated, he will have to take care of his own food, clothes, shoes, his own house and so on. In the case of such a closed economy and universalization of labor, firstly, its productivity will be low and, secondly, it will be able to consume only what it produces. It is clear that human productivity will be higher and more profitable as a result of labor specialization and the opportunity to trade with others. Indeed, trade allows each person to specialize, to engage in the activities that are most successful, be it agriculture, sewing or construction, and to buy more diverse goods and services from others at a relatively lower price. The key to such human interactions is that trade is mutually beneficial; That markets are usually the good means of coordination between people and that the government can improve the results of market functioning if the market reveals weakness or the results of market functioning are not fair. Moroever, it also shows how the economy works as a whole. In particular, it is argued that productivity is a key determinant of living standards, that an increase in the money supply is a major source of inflation, and that one of the main impediments to avoiding inflation is the existence of an alternative between inflation and unemployment in the short term, that the inflation decrease causes the temporary decline in unemployement and vice versa. The Understanding creatively of all above mentioned issues, we think, will help the reader to develop market economy-appropriate thinking and rational economic-commercial-financial behaviors, to be more competitive in the domestic and international labor markets, and thus to ensure both their own prosperity and the functioning of the country's economy. How he/she copes with the tasks, it is up to the individual reader to decide. At the same time, we will receive all the smart useful advices with a sense of gratitude and will take it into account in the further work. We also would like to thank the editor and reviewers of the books. Finally, there are many things changing, so it is very important to realize that the XXI century has come: 1. The century of the new economy; 2. Age of Knowledge; 3. Age of Information and economic activities are changing in term of innovations. 1. Why is the 21st century the century of the new economy? Because for this period the economic resources, especially non-productive, non-recoverable ones (oil, natural gas, coal, etc.) are becoming increasingly limited. According to the World Energy Council, there are currently 43 years of gas and oil reserves left in the world (see “New Commersant 2007 # 2, p. 16). Under such conditions, sustainable growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) and maximum satisfaction of uncertain needs should be achieved not through the use of more land, labor and capital (extensification), but through more efficient use of available resources (intensification) or innovative economy. And economics, as it was said, is the science of finding the ways about the more effective usage of the limited resources. At the same time, with the sustainable growth and development of the economy, the present needs must be met in a way that does not deprive future generations of the opportunity to meet their needs; 2. Why is the 21st century the age of knowledge? Because in a modern economy, it is not land (natural resources), labor and capital that is crucial, but knowledge. Modern production, its factors and products are not time-consuming and capital-intensive, but science-intensive, knowledge-intensive. The good example of this is a Japanese enterprise (firm) where the production process is going on but people are almost invisible, also, the result of such production (Japanese product) is a miniature or a sample of how to get the maximum result at the lowest cost; 3. Why is the 21st century the age of information? Because the efficient functioning of the modern economy, the effective organization of the material and personal factors of production largely depend on the right governance decision. The right governance decision requires prompt and accurate information. Gone are the days when the main means of transport was a sailing ship, the main form of data processing was pencil and paper, and the main means of transmitting information was sending letters through a postman on horseback. By the modern transport infrastructure (highways, railways, ships, regular domestic and international flights, oil and gas pipelines, etc.), the movement of goods, services and labor resoucres has been significantly accelerated, while through the modern means of communication (mobile phone, internet, other) the information is spreading rapidly globally, which seems to have "shrunk" the world and made it a single large country. The Authors of the book: Ushangi Samadashvili, Doctor of Economic Sciences, Associate Professor of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University - Introduction, Chapters - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11,12, 15,16, 17.1,18 , Tests, Revaz Shengelia, Doctor of Economics, Professor of Georgian Technical University, Chapters_7, 8, 13. 14, 17.2, 17.4; Zhuzhuna Tsiklauri - Doctor of Economics, Professor of Georgian Technical University - Chapters 13.6, 13.7,17.2, 17.3, 18. We also thank the editor and reviewers of the book.