Every time you buy a can of tuna or a new television, its bar code is scanned to record its price and other information. These "scanner data" offer a number of attractive features for economists and statisticians, because they are collected continuously, are available quickly, and record prices for all items sold, not just a statistical sample. But scanner data also present a number of difficulties for current statistical systems.
"Scanner Data and Price Indexes" assesses both the promise and the challenges of using scanner data to produce economic statistics. Three papers present the...

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in "Dido's Daughters," this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes...

Over the past two hundred years, thousands of ancient Greek vases have been unearthed. Yet debate continues about what the images depicted on these vases actually meant to ancient Greek viewers.

This classic study still provides one of the most acute descriptions available of an often misunderstood subculture: that of fantasy role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Alan Fine immerses himself in several different gaming systems, offering insightful details on the nature of the games and the patterns of interaction among players-as well as their reasons for playing.

In his most ambitious book since Time on the Cross, the Nobel Prize-winning economist looks to the nation's past to discover the strong link between technologically induced cycles of religiousness--or awakenings--in American history and attitudes toward poverty, education, and social equality. Line drawings. Tables.

Walk near woods or water on any spring or summer night and you will hear a bewildering (and sometimes deafening) chorus of frog, toad, and insect calls. How are these calls produced? What messages are encoded within the sounds, and how do their intended recipients receive and decode these signals? How does acoustic communication affect and reflect behavioral and evolutionary factors such as sexual selection and predator avoidance?
H. Carl Gerhardt and Franz Huber address these questions among many others, drawing on research from bioacoustics, behavior, neurobiology, and evolutionary...

Puccini's operas are among the most popular and widely performed in the world, yet few books have examined his body of work from an analytical perspective. This volume remedies that lack in lively prose accessible to scholars and opera enthusiasts alike.

This remarkable history tells the story of the independent city-republic of Basel in the nineteenth century, and of four major thinkers who shaped its intellectual history: the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philologist and anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen, the theologian Franz Overbeck, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

From Ulysses' Argo to Freud's Lun, these stories explore the mysterious and often intense relationship between human beings and dogs. Illustrating a broad knowledge of literary dog lovers, and elaborating on their insights, Grenier's volume abounds with humour and history.