The role generations play in accepting and shaping digital technologies, and possibly vice versa, is an increasingly relevant issue in contemporary society. For the first time in the academic debate, this volume outlines the theoretical issues and explores some results from empirical researches on the relationship between generations and the media in digital society. The first part of the book deals with the theoretical debate on generations, from Mannheim s to the revisiting of some classical notions shaped by disciplines as history, demography, marketing and sociology. The second part...

A political science approach integrates multidisciplinary case studies about culture and language from multiple perspectives. Culture and language are viewed broadly with topics ranging widely across the conflict/cooperation continuum of human activities. Case studies involve four perspectives on culture and language linguistic perspectives, cultural perspectives, identity perspectives, and visual perspectives. Each chapter is self-standing with conclusions about the case study at hand. The final chapter integrates all the case studies with separate conclusions about each of the four...

William Shakespeare s comedy A Midsummer Night s Dream (1595) has survived and flourished as a drama for over five centuries. The work has also enjoyed immense popularity in music. Its lyrical verse, its constant use of musical terminology, and its references to and deployment of songs and dances have served to attract major composers over more than four centuries. The book compares their libretti with the original text, and analyzes how alterations in text and structure have affected the nature of Shakespeare s original play its plot, characterization and lyricism. The study...

The political and social changes that occurred with the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Roman Christian Empire and with the bishops new social position as imperial bishops called for new literary representations of the ideal Christian leader. In this struggle, the figure of Moses turned up as a suitable figure intimately connected with questions of authority and power and, related to this, with the risk of dissension and discord. While the portrait of Moses as a political figure was hardly applicable in Christian discourses of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, it became the centre of...

Sustainability is widely defined as -the ability to meet the needs of the present while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems and without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs-. However, the goal of managing today s resources so that they may be available to future generations is not easy to reach. Indeed, in order to achieve this ambitious goal, it is important that universities similar to other sectors of society become engaged in the sustainability debate, not superficially as it has largely been the case until now, but in a manner...

The volume is a selection of papers presented at the International Conference on Foreign Influences on Medieval English held in Warsaw on 12-13 December 2009 and organized by the School of English at the Warsaw Division of the Academy of Management in Lodz (Wyzsza Szkola Przedsiebiorczosci i Zarzadzania). The papers cover a wide range of topics concerning the impact of Latin, Scandinavian, French and Celtic on Old and Middle English from orthography, morphology and syntax to lexical semantics and onomastics."

A huge success in both bookshops and cinemas, the Harry Potter-series has drawn millions of readers and viewers into its magical world. In constructing this world, however, J. K. Rowling has created Harry and his friends in sharp contrast to other members of the magical and non-magical world. Creating Magical Worlds: Otherness and Othering in Harry Potter argues that the identities of the heroes are mainly based on delimitation from and rivalry to other characters: the Slytherins and Deatheaters, foreign students from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, magical races such as the...

The papers in this collection analyse the professionalism of teachers in Estonia and neighbouring countries from several perspectives. Data from the OECD TALIS survey have been used to study the transformation of the teaching profession in recent years. As Estonia is bicultural, one paper deals with the transition to Estonian as the language of instruction in Russian-medium schools. Teacher professionalism is related to communication skills and this is also explored. It is generally accepted that teachers beliefs guide them in their daily work, and so three papers deal with the professional...

These stories by Otti Binswanger, the niece of the German aviator Otto Lilienthal, were written in the 1940s in New Zealand, where they were published originally in 1945. Otti Binswanger had come to New Zealand in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany together with her husband Paul Binswanger, a German-Jewish scholar of Romance Languages. These stories constitute an important and highly original contribution not only to New Zealand literature, but also to the corpus of literature by exiles in the 20th century. In her stories Otti Binswanger creates an authentic, sympathetic, and at the same...

The devastating impacts of the recent global financial crisis underscore the need for both financial institutions and banking supervision to develop more appropriate credit risk models to ensure the stability of the financial system. This work contributes to quantitative credit portfolio risk modeling in three ways. First, it introduces a general credit portfolio modeling concept that comprises specific credit risk management models as special cases. Second, analytical techniques are presented for specifying asset correlations in a credit portfolio through systematic factors. Finally, a new...