Suchergebnisse

Review of Matthew Pustz, ed. Comic books and American cultural history: An anthology. London: Continuum, 2012. Hardcover, $110.00 (296p) ISBN 978-1441163196; paperback, $29.95, ISBN 978-1441172624.

This article provides a series of close readings of Barack Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father. It places the narrative within the history of African American literature and rhetoric and argues that Obama uses the text to create a life story that resonates with central concepts of African American selfhood and black male identity, including double consciousness, invisibility, and black nationalism. The article reads Dreams from My Father as an attempt to arrive at a state of "functional Blackness," which moves away from questions of racial authenticity and identity politics but recognizes the narrative powers of African American literature to shape a convincing and appealing black self. ; peerReviewed

This article provides a series of close readings of Barack Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father. It places the narrative within the history of African American literature and rhetoric and argues that Obama uses the text to create a life story that resonates with central concepts of African American selfhood and black male identity, including double consciousness, invisibility, and black nationalism. The article reads Dreams from My Father as an attempt to arrive at a state of "functional Blackness," which moves away from questions of racial authenticity and identity politics but recognizes the narrative powers of African American literature to shape a convincing and appealing black self.

Better insurance against rainfall risk could improve the security of hundreds of millions of agricultural households around the world. However, customers have shown little demand for stand-alone insurance products. This paper theoretically and experimentally analyzes an innovative financial product called a Weather Insurance Savings Account (WISA), which combines savings and rainfall insurance. The paper uses a standard model of intertemporal insurance demand to study how customers demand for a WISA varies with the amount of insurance offered. A laboratory experiment is then used to elicit participants valuations of pure insurance, pure savings, and intermediate WISA types. Contrary to the standard model, within-subjects comparisons show that many participants prefer both pure insurance and pure savings to any interior mixture of the two, suggesting that market demand for a WISA is likely to be low. Additional experimental and observational evidence distinguishes between several alternative explanations. One possibility that survives the additional tests is diminishing sensitivity to losses, as in prospect theory.

This paper estimates how experimentally-manipulated experiences with a novel financial product, rainfall index insurance, affect subsequent insurance demand. Using a seven-year panel, we develop three main findings. First, recent experience matters for demand, consistent with overinference from small samples. Second, spillovers also matter, in the sense that the recent payout experience of village co-residents affects insurance demand about as much as one's own recent payout experience. Third, the spillover effect decays as time passes while the effect of one's own experience does not. We discuss implications of this analysis for commercial sustainability of this complicated but promising risk management technology.

Since its introduction in the mid 90ies, the Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) standard for digital radio broadcast has been deployed in most European and Asian government networks and public safety networks. The underlying Adaptive Code-Excitation Linear Prediction scheme employs adaptive code books which are optimized for human speech. However, harmonic distortions of the hardware are amplified as well, which we will show via spectrograms and frequency analysis. While many studies indicate that human perception neglects these distortions up to a Total Harmonic Distortion of about 1%, their impact on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) can be dramatic. In this paper, we demonstrate this effect on a strong recognition system for German broadcast news, using a dedicated fire fighter radio transmitter. We will dissect the influence of the hardware and the software components by analysing the word error rate, typical word substitutions and changes in the extracted features. We also suggest countermeasures to obtain a stronger ASR system in this setting.

"This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture.
The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid medialities and experimental aesthetics ""between"" comics and videogames; the second part zooms in on how comics and videogames function as transmedia expansions within an increasingly convergent and participatory media culture. The individual chapters address synergies and intersections between comics and videogames via a diverse set of case studies ranging from independent and experimental projects via popular franchises from the corporate worlds of DC and Marvel to the more playful forms of media mix prominent in Japan.
Offering an innovative intervention into a number of salient issues in current media culture, Comics and Videogames will be of interest to scholars and students of comics studies, game studies, popular culture studies, transmedia studies, and visual culture studies."