The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism. Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black. Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa on the basis of their morphological similarity, and does not primarily examine genealogical relationships. Due to the scarcity of morphological diversity of scripts’ features, random coincidences of evolution-independent features are much more common in scripts than in biological species, thus phenetic modelling based solely on morphological features can lead to erroneous results. For this reason, phenetic modeling has been extended with evolutionary considerations, thereby allowing the modelling uncertainties observed in the script evolution to be addressed due to the large number of random coincidences (homoplasies) characterizing each script. The book describes an extended phenetic method developed to investigate the script evolution. This data-driven approach helps to reduce the impact of the uncertainties inherent in the phenetic model due to the large number of homoplasies that occur during the evolution of scripts. The elaborated phenetic and evolutionary analyses were applied to the Rovash scripts used on the Eurasian Steppe (Grassland), including the Turkic Rovash (Turkic Runic/runiform) and the Székely-Hungarian Rovash. The evaluation of the extended phenetic model of the scripts, the various phenograms, the script spectra and the group spectra helped to reconstruct the main ancestors and evolutionary stages of the investigated scripts.

History Book

The fifth edition of Business Ethics addresses current, intriguing, often complex issues in corporate morality through 53 readings and 30 pertinent case studies. Now significantly updated, it includes new leading articles, related current cases, and mini-cases based on MBA student dilemmas. Addresses a broad range of the most current, intriguing, often complex issues and cases in corporate morality Provides impartial, point-counterpoint presentations of different perspectives on the most important and highly contended issues of business ethics Updated and significant case studies are included to reinforce student learning Now contains mini-cases based on actual MBA student dilemmas Each author has substantial experience in teaching, writing, and conducting research in the field

The LNCS series reports state-of-the-art results in computer science research, development, and education, at a high level and in both printed and electronic form. Enjoying tight cooperation with the R&D community, with numerous individuals, as well as with prestigious organizations and societies, LNCS has grown into the most comprehensive computer science research forum available. The scope of LNCS, including its subseries LNAI and LNBI, spans the whole range of computer science and information technology including interdisciplinary topics in a variety of application fields. In parallel to the printed book, each new volume is published electronically in LNCS Online.

Furthers our understanding of the practices and activities of video games, specifically focusing on the intersection of games with sexual content as considered by a number of different theoretical approaches.