University of Michigan Press

World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants. In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes. Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.

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This article is an attempt to utilize psycholinguistic research to develop a framework for the teaching of reading to second language (L2) learners. The first section highlights current psycholinguistic reading theory and develops goals for L2 reading teachers based on this theory. The proficient reader is viewed as an active, information‐processing individual who uses a minimum number of clues to extract the author's message from the page. It becomes the responsibility of teachers to train students to determine their own goals and strategies for a particular reading, to give students practice and encouragement in using a minimum number of syntactic and semantic clues to obtain the maximum amount of information, and to encourage students to take risks, to guess, and to ignore their impulses to be always correct. In an attempt to translate theory into practice, the second section of the article explores the implications of a psycholinguistic perspective for the learning environment, teacher behavior, and the preparation and use of L2 reading materials. The optimum learning environment is viewed as one in which students and teachers work together: teacher intervention is minimized as students are encouraged to use their developing skills to solve reading problems on their own. Materials development is viewed as being composed of the development of reading skills exercises (scanning, skimming, reading for thorough comprehension, and critical reading) and the development of language skills exercises (vocabulary, structure, and discourse). The third section of the article discusses lesson planning within a psycholinguistic framework and presents a sample lesson plan in English as a second language which emphasizes a skills approach to reading. Lessons are planned for maximum flexibility, allowing the teacher to take advantage of students' interests and needs.

Reviews 83 that they have successfully extracted and amplified human nucleic DNA and mitochondrial DNA from the human brain of Florida's Windover, the arctic human burials and South American mummies, respectively.Herrmann and Hummel demonstrate that DNA sex detennination is practical on human bones; this is important for physical anthropology and archaeology, because for some juvenile skeletons, it is extremely difficult to use morphological traits for sex determination.Overall, this is a very good.bock for both general interest readers and researchers.General readers can learn what has been done to date in this interesting field and what can be accomplished in the future.Researchers can use this bock as an "ancient DNA recipe bock" along with other lab manuals in their ancient DNA study.The only drawback is that some of the contents of the book cannot be regarded as the latest achievements because ancient DNA study is a rapidly growing field.

Anatomy of a Civil War demonstrates the destructive nature of war, ranging from the physical destruction, to a range of psycho-social problems, and to the detrimental effects on the environment. Despite such horrific aspects of war, evidence suggests that civil war is likely to generate multilayered outcomes. To examine the transformative aspects of civil war, Mehmet Gurses draws on an original survey conducted in Turkey, where a Kurdish armed group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been waging an intermittent insurgency for Kurdish self-rule since 1984. Findings from a probability sample of 2,100 individuals randomly selected from three major Kurdish-populated provinces in the eastern part of Turkey, coupled with insights from face-to-face in-depth interviews with dozens of individuals affected by violence, provide evidence for the multifaceted nature of exposure to violence during civil war.

In the United States, preschool education is characterized by the dominance of a variegated private sector and patchy, uncoordinated oversight of the public sector. Tracing the history of the American debate over preschool education, Andrew Karch argues that the current state of decentralization and fragmentation is the consequence of a chain of reactions and counterreactions to policy decisions dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when preschool advocates did not achieve their vision for a comprehensive national program but did manage to foster initiatives at both the state and national levels. Over time, beneficiaries of these initiatives and officials with jurisdiction over preschool education have become ardent defenders of the status quo. Today, advocates of greater government involvement must take on a diverse and entrenched set of constituencies resistant to policy change.

A bstract Since the 1980s, much debate has revolved around Karl Polanyi's concept of the “dis/embedded economy,” generating some light and not a little heat. This paper looks at three reasons that account for part of the “heat.” It begins by tracing the sources upon which Polanyi drew. They include Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber, along with anthropology of the inter‐war period, and German and American Institutionalist economics. After exploring the differing ways in which these varying currents conceptualize the relationship between economy and society, I explore the different interpretations of what Polanyi means by embeddedness, and the different purposes to which contemporary economic sociologists have put the term. For some, he is held up as the originator of a line of sociological analysis that treats “the economy” as a subsystem “embedded in” a social system. In this reading the emphasis is upon the moral underpinnings of market behavior, in contrast to the naturalism of Ricardo, Malthus and their heirs. For others, his “disembedding” thesis contains a more radical tale: of the market economy coming to dominate “society,” bringing forth a sorcerer's apprentice world of untrammeled market forces that, although human creations, lie beyond conscious human control.

Drones and Support for the Use of Force utilizes experimental research to analyze the effects of combat drones on Americans' support for the use of force. The authors develop expectations drawn from social science theory and then assess these conjectures using a series of survey experiments. Their findings—that drones have had important but nuanced effects on support for the use of force—have implications for democratic control of military action and civil-military relations, and provide insight into how the development and proliferation of current and future military technologies influence the domestic politics of foreign policy.

On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important activity: the federally funded after-school programs that offer tutoring, homework help, and basic supervision to millions of American children. Nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students’ math and reading skills, these programs also have a profound impact on parents. In a surprising turn—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated—government-funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement by shifting power away from bureaucrats and putting it back into the hands of parents. In State of Empowerment Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.

People’s Wars in China, Malaya, and Vietnam explains why some insurgencies collapse after a military defeat while under other circumstances insurgents are able to maintain influence, rebuild strength, and ultimately defeat the government. The author argues that ultimate victory in civil wars rests on the size of the coalition of social groups established by each side during the conflict. When insurgents establish broad social coalitions (relative to the incumbent), their movement will persist even when military defeats lead to loss of control of territory because they enjoy the support of the civilian population and civilians will not defect to the incumbent. By contrast, when insurgents establish narrow coalitions, civilian compliance is solely a product of coercion. Where insurgents implement such governing strategies, battlefield defeats translate into political defeats and bring about a collapse of the insurgency because civilians defect to the incumbent. The empirical chapters of the book consist of six case studies of the most consequential insurgencies of the 20th century including that led by the Chinese Communist Party from 1927 to 1949, the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), and the Vietnam War (1960–1975). People’s Wars breaks new ground in systematically analyzing and comparing these three canonical cases of insurgency. The case studies of China and Malaya make use of Chinese-language archival sources, many of which have never before been used and provide an unprecedented level of detail into the workings of successful and unsuccessful insurgencies. The book adopts an interdisciplinary approach and will be of interest to both political scientists and historians. Funding is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.

Strategic voting is classically defined as “voting for one’s second preferred option to prevent one’s least preferred option from winning when one’s first preference has no chance.” Voters want their votes to be effective, and casting a ballot that will have no influence on an election is undesirable—therefore, some voters cast a strategic ballot when they decide it is useful. This edited volume includes case studies of strategic voting behavior in Israel, Germany, Japan, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, and the UK, and provides a conceptual framework for understanding strategic voting behavior in all types of electoral systems.

Document complet disponible sur OLIS dans son format d'origine Complete document available on OLIS in its original formatMEASUREMENT OF NON-TARIFF BARRIERS For governments, the advantage of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to trade is that their effects are more certain than for tariffs. Now that tariff barriers have been substantially reduced, there has been increasing interest in the ways that non-tariff barriers (NTBs) may distort and restrict international trade. This working paper assesses currently available methods for quantifying NTBs. Calculation of the tariff equivalent of a given NTB for a given economic indicator is complex, and requires a great deal of information. Measures that are equivalent for one indicator will not be so for others, and there is no substitute for NTB-specific expertise. BARRIERES NON TARIFAIRES L’avantage, pour les gouvernements, des barrières non tarifaires au commerce (BNT), est que leurs effets sont plus certains que ceux des droits de douane. Les manières dont les BNT peuvent entraîner un effet de distorsion et de restriction du commerce international suscitent un intérêt croissant depuis la réduction substantielle des barrières tarifaires. Ce document de travail analyse les méthodes actuellement disponibles qui permettent d’évaluer quantitativement les BNT. Le calcul du droit de douane équivalent à une BNT donnée, pour un indicateur économique donné, est complexe et nécessite un grand nombre d’information. Des mesures équivalentes pour un indicateur ne le seront pas pour d’autres, et rien ne peut remplacer les connaissances techniques d’un type spécifique de BNT.

In Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus, author Arum Park explores two notoriously difficult ancient Greek poets and seeks to articulate the complex relationship between them. Although Pindar and Aeschylus were contemporaries, previous scholarship has often treated them as representatives of contrasting worldviews. Park’s comparative study offers the alternative perspective of understanding them as complements instead. By examining these poets together through the concepts of reciprocity, truth, and gender, this book establishes a relationship between Pindar and Aeschylus that challenges previous conceptions of their dissimilarity. The book accomplishes three aims: first, it shows that Pindar and Aeschylus frame their poetry using similar principles of reciprocity; second, it demonstrates that each poet depicts truth in a way that is specific to those reciprocity principles; and finally, it illustrates how their depictions of gender are shaped by this intertwining of truth and reciprocity. By demonstrating their complementarity, the book situates Pindar and Aeschylus in the same poetic ecosystem, which has implications for how we understand ancient Greek poetry more broadly: using Pindar and Aeschylus as case studies, the book provides a window into their dynamic and interactive poetic world, a world in which ostensibly dissimilar poets and genres actually have much more in common than we might think.

The effect of religious factors on politics has been a key issue since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of religious terrorism. However, the systematic investigations of these topics have focused primarily on the effects of religion on domestic and international conflict. Scriptures, Shrines, Scapegoats, and World Politics offers a comprehensive evaluation of the role of religion in international relations, broadening the scope of investigation to such topics as the relationship between religion and cooperation, religion and conflict, and the relationship between religion and the quality of life. Religion is often manipulated by political elites to advance their principal goal of political survival. Zeev Maoz and Errol A. Henderson find that no specific religion is either consistently more bellicose or consistently more cooperative than other religions. However, religious similarity between states tends to reduce the propensity of conflict and increase the opportunity for security cooperation. The authors find a significant relationship between secularism and human security.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had surprisingly little impact on women's citizenship or the American constitutional order. For seventy-two years, from 1848 until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, suffrage was the central demand of the woman rights movement in the United States. Women demanded the right to vote in the nineteenth century because they believed it would make them first class citizens with all the rights and privileges of other first class citizens. Both normatively and instrumentally, the suffragists believed that voting would secure equal citizenship for women by raising their civic status and allowing them to assert their political interests. Yet in many ways women were more politically efficacious in the years just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment than they were afterward. Further, their ability to claim rights from the courts and legislatures, on the basis of their new status as voting citizens, was limited.

TERRORISMlaw, liberty, and the pursuit of terrorism It is commonly believed that a state facing a terrorist threat responds with severe legislation that compromises civil liberties in favor of national security.Roger Douglas compares responses to terrorism by five liberal democraciesthe United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-over the past 15 years.He examines each nation's development and implementation of counterterrorism law, specifically in the areas of information gathering, the definition of terrorist offenses, due process for the accused, detention, and torture and other forms of coercive questioning.Douglas finds that terrorist attacks elicit pressures for quick responses, which often allow national governments to accrue additional powers.But emergencies are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such laws, which may persist even after fears have eased.He argues that responses are influenced by institutional interests and prior beliefs and are complicated when the exigencies of office and beliefs point in different directions.He also argues that citizens are wary of government's impingement on civil liberties and that courts exercise their capacity to restrain the legislative and executive branches.Douglas concludes that the worst antiterror excesses have taken place outside of, rather than within, the law and that the legacy of 9/11 includes both laws that expand government powers and judicial decisions that limit those very powers.

University presses occupy a distinctive field of publishing, heavily tied to the fortunes of the universities and colleges in which they are usually situated. COVID-19 has catalysed their adoption of digital technologies; focused their commitments to social justice; and given new impetus to business models and formats that fully leverage the Internet, especially open access. Economic pressures on higher education that seem set only to increase are also driving university presses to more interdependent approaches and an emphasis on the contributions of the university press network to knowledge infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. This article explores how university presses have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular reference to the experiences of the University of Michigan Press. It concludes that the diversity of types of university presses is one of the greatest strengths of this field of publishing and makes it resilient in a time of unprecedented change.

The essays gathered in this volume present multifaceted considerations of the intersection of objects and gender within the cultural contexts of late medieval France and England. Some take a material view of objects, showing buildings, books, and pictures as sites of gender negotiation and resistance and as extensions of women’s bodies. Others reconsider the concept of objectification in the lives of fictional and historical medieval women by looking closely at their relation to gendered material objects, taken literally as women’s possessions and as figurative manifestations of their desires.

Résumé Dans un ouvrage novateur, France de gauche, vote à droite (1981), Jacques Capdevielle et al . ont mis à jour il y a une trentaine d’années l’existence d’un « effet patrimoine » expliquant de façon significative le comportement électoral en France. Malgré la portée de ce résultat, l’étude de cette question a reçu moins d’attention par la suite. La mesure du patrimoine a occupé de moins en moins de place dans les enquêtes électorales françaises, notamment au moment des élections présidentielles de 2007. Nous démontrons dans ce texte que l’effet patrimoine est toujours aussi pertinent aujourd’hui pour expliquer le comportement électoral en France. En proposant un modèle général inspiré des travaux sur l’aversion au risque, nous montrons comment le patrimoine risqué se révèle être un puissant prédicteur du vote à droite en France sur la période 1988-2007. Ce constat montre l’intérêt de renouer avec un concept novateur de la science politique française.

Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice, and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The volume aims at highlighting some of the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, also taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on law and literature in the Renaissance.