bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Photo Essay
Authors: Hamilakis Yannis , Ifantidis Fotis
Published: February 2014

In this photoessay (based on the photo-blog, www.theotheracropolis.com) the reader/viewer is invited to an alternative tour of the Athenian Acropolis. It moves beyond the monumentalization and sacralization of the classical to expose neglected or suppressed materialities (such as the medieval, the Ottoman, and the more recent social life of the site), and it shows how these materialities, through their sensorial properties, have the power to persist, enacting multiple times simultaneously. They thus offer us alternative ways of conceptualizing temporality, beyond the modernist tropes of linearity and succession. At the same time, this essay is a plea for archaeologists and other material culture specialists to engage with the photographic medium in creative ways, beyond its use as documentation. The photographic process is not deployed here as a representational device but as an embodied, evocative practice which can enable a multi-sensory and kinaesthetic engagement with materiality and temporality.
Protest
Authors: Badcock Anna , Johnston Robert
Published: February 2014

This chapter explores how the study of material culture brings new perspectives to protest and activism in the contemporary world. Its focus is the peace and environmental protests in Britain during the last thirty years, although the chapter also draws upon examples from other times and places. The chapter is organized into five themes: the use of the body in the performance of protest; the creation of novel networks of humans and things through activism; demonstrations as acts of bearing witness to power; the histories and technologies that provide the foundations and legitimacy for protest; and finally the politics of researching activism. Archaeologies of protest can force established authorities to recognize repressed voices, they can challenge the myths and ideologies of activism, and above all they can be a process of revealing power as it was, is, and can be.
Ruins
Authors: Lucas Gavin
Published: February 2014

This chapter explores the nature of recent ruins, highlighting some of the features which distinguish them from the classical ruin. Particular emphasis is laid on the ruin as a process rather than a static object, attending to the hybrid agencies involved at ruin sites. A large part of the chapter is given to examining the temporality and memory of ruins. The notion that the recent ruin is an untimely one is explored, both in the sense of ruination occurring too early, but also happening too fast. Such premature ruins can be linked to the particular nature of late/post/supermodernity where memory is often all too short. Moreover recent ruins, in unfettered states of decay and unaffected by the quarantine practices of heritage management, also offer an important source of investigation for memory work, to which archaeology is particularly well-suited. Such raw materialities stand as vital counter-memorials to the more explicit and often sanitized forms of commemoration.
Sectarianism
Authors: McAtackney Laura
Published: February 2014

An archaeological study of contemporary Northern Ireland adds a material dimension to debates on the impact-or otherwise-of the recent peace process on lived experiences in the province. This chapter has selected the study of security installations, peace walls, and Long Kesh/Maze prison as three manifestations of the Troubles in order to dissect how they have transitioned to the post-conflict context. Of particular note is how incomplete official attempts to refocus place identity have resulted in some of these sites becoming overly identified with one-sided Troubles narratives whilst others have taken on new, if decidedly sinister, meanings. Whilst it is impossible to be definitive about ongoing societal transformation, at this time it is clear that nearly 15 years after the Belfast Agreement (1998) the peace dividends promised by local and international politicians continue to be contradicted by material realities.
Silicon Valley
Authors: Finn Christine
Published: February 2014

Silicon Valley’s technological motherlode is an unlikely find site for traditional excavation, but it provides contemporary archaeologists with a unique take on material culture. The author, who is also a journalist, witnessed the rapid change-over-time in the fortunes of Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom, and bust of 1999/2000. She has continued her fieldwork over the past decade, and she argues that the cycle of technology-from cutting edge to redundancy-and those whose prescience has preserved the discards of technology, offer valuable material for contemporary archaeology. She situates the assemblages of computer collectors, with the curated artefacts in tech museums, and other institutions engaged with the history of computing, and suggests that it is the hobbyists, often with specialist insight into a family of product or machine, who have played a valuable role in saving Silicon Valley heritage by collecting at a time of accelerating discard.
The Archaeology of Space Exploration
Authors: Gorman Alice C. , O'Leary Beth Laura
Published: February 2014

The exploration of space is a Cold War phenomenon and is recent material culture which archaeologists do not routinely consider. Extending the archaeological gaze into space creates a new perspective of Earth: its cultural system which reaches into the solar system. This chapter provides a definition and discussion of space archaeology. The assemblage continues to grow especially in Earth’s orbit and on celestial bodies (e.g. Moon). All space objects exist within the cultural landscape of Earth’s multiple facilities such as launch sites, research facilities, etc. The landscape is designed, associative, and organically evolving. It is an extremely technological collection that includes in situ scientific experiments and satellites. Proveniences are complex. Artefacts can exist in relatively predictable orbits. Much of this archaeological record benefits from the benign effects of the space environment and its remoteness, but lie within a contested grey legal area in terms of its international preservation.
The Materiality Of Film
Authors: Watkins Liz
Published: February 2014

Celluloid is material. The film image is inscribed and projected by light, whilst its substrate of celluloid and photosensitive emulsion has tended to be suppressed rather than exploited by filmmakers. In addition to the information provided at the levels of image content and narrative, each strip of film sustains a supplementary register of the marks and scratches of the machines of production and replay. These marginalia bear a direct relation to the circulation and storage of the film and so offer an index of its use. As the photographic image deteriorates, detritus accumulates, tracing the environmental effects of storage. Archivists seek to make sense of these marks, to discern the legacy of production from the impact of storage to identify the film. This information can be read. It is not explicative of the past, but called into an archaeological conversation around the remains of the past in the present. The study of film discerns an assemblage of texts and artefacts through which to decipher the material traces of others.
The Place of Things in Contemporary History
Authors: Cole Tim
Published: February 2014

This essay examines the variety of ways that historians have engaged with material culture in their work over the last few decades. Although textual records from the archive remain privileged sources, the diversity of historiographical approach has led to a range of historiographical practices including a material turn. Two major approaches to objects have dominated. Dubbed ‘object driven’ and ‘object centred’, these variously use objects as evidence for a very wide range of research questions, and focus on past material cultures respectively. Focusing on a case study of Holocaust historiography, the essay identifies the challenges for contemporary archaeology generated by these two historiographical traditions, as well as by the self-reflectivity over narrating material pasts/past materialities that characterizes historical practice.
To the Things Themselves Again
Authors: Finlayson James Gordon
Published: February 2014

What is a thing? It is an apparently simple question to which few philosophers or social scientists have devoted any serious attention. This chapter attempts to explain this neglect, and then to develop a way of thinking about the question by distinguishing things, and the concept ‘thing’, from objects and entities with which they are often conflated. This more refined and adequate conception of the thing is then deployed in order to help answer two related questions: ‘Why do things matter? What are the grounds of our attachment to them, and of our obligations towards them?’ It is argued that an endemic failure within philosophy and social science to reflect on what constitutes the thinghood of things makes it harder than it need be to answer questions concerning their value and why they matter to us.
Two Riots
Authors: Dixon James R.
Published: February 2014

This chapter asks how archaeologists can approach civil unrest and what riots can tell us about the contemporary world that other kinds of events cannot. The first part of the chapter describes two riots, the ‘Bronze Night’ in Tallinn in April 2007 and the ‘Tesco Riot’ in Bristol in April 2011. These two very different events can be analysed in terms of their enrolments and implications as contemporary events and how they might be approached by archaeologists seeking to understand the world in a different way. The second part of the chapter looks to artistic engagements with the material conditions of these two riots to add to what can be understood through archaeological analysis. Finally, the chapter discusses how we might use existing theory to understand riots archaeologically and identify areas we perhaps need to work to understand better.
A Noisy Brush with the Infinite
Authors: Marks Laura U.
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay considers “noise” in light of enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, a model in which the infinite, information, and images (considered multisensory) respectively enfold and unfold from one another, in ever-changing relationships. According to this model, which is informed by the philosophy of Leibniz, Bergson, and Deleuze, our perception selectively unfolds some aspect of the infinite, but most of the infinite appears as noise. However, a sort of quantitative filter often predetermines what we perceive, so that what we end up perceiving is the product of information; moreover, this often occurs in the service of profit. The essay proposes ways to avoid both the paralysis of all-noise and the strangulation of all-information through creatively deploying enfolding-unfolding aesthetics in art and everyday life.
“Charm the Air to Give a Sound”
Authors: Herzog Amy
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay examines the soundscape and architecture of Punchdrunk’s immersive theater installation Sleep No More (New York, 2011). Although many of its sonic references are drawn from well-known analog sources, their deployment marks a shift in the role of sound in theater and film. The installation’s sound environment establishes ambience and also guides and synchronizes the actions of the individual audience- and cast members who navigate the space during each performance. The use of sonic cues, in this context, draws directly from the logic of role-playing video games. Moreover, the use of rhythm and repetition in Sleep No More resonates on an even deeper register with similar architectures of meaning in some of the work’s key points of reference. A careful examination the work’s structure reveals a complex deployment of sonic patterning that activates new connections with historical texts and challenges our understanding of the experience of sound, touch, and performance in the digital era.
Museum Without Walls, Art History Without Names
Authors: Manovich Lev
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. The essay presents the theoretical analysis of key conceptual steps involved in generating visualizations of media artifacts and large collections of these artifacts. These steps and associated concepts are “data,” “metadata,” “feature extraction,” “information visualization,” “media visualization,” “mapping” and “remapping.” The essay first briefly reviews recent developments in visualization techniques. Next, it discusses the key conceptual steps that take us from artifacts to visualizations. As illustrations, the essay uses selected visualizations created in the author’s lab softarestudies.com. The last section summarizes the discussion and links the new possibilities opened up by use of visualization of large visual collections to the relevant concepts developed by earlier twentieth-century art historians—Heinrich Wölfflin’s “Art History Names” and André Malraux’s “Museum without Walls.”
Explorations in Cultureson
Authors: Smith Jacob
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This article builds upon Lev Manovich’s useful taxonomy of recent techniques of information visualization aligned with cultural research—what he calls “culturevis”—in order to sketch the domain of an incipient “cultureson” and consider some implications of recent visualizations of sound culture. Examples include several types of auditory display and sonification, the eduction of visual inscriptions of sound phenomena by members of the First Sounds organization, mashup remixes, and “musical intelligence” software.
Music and the State of Exception in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men
Authors: Chapman Dale
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben provides an analysis of the “state of exception,” that situation in which the sovereign, in response to crisis, suspends the efficacy of the rule of law. This juridical move has ontological implications, for it also suspends our everyday experience of time. Music, which can emulate the concentrated temporality of the state of exception, offers itself as a powerful formal tool for its cinematic realization.
In his 2006 setting of the P.D. James novel Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón conjures a future dystopia that extrapolates this complicated political terrain. Drawing upon the complex diegetic and non-diegetic soundscape of the film, this discussion outlines the means through which music and sound intensify the filmic depiction of the state of exception.
Outside the Law of Action
Authors: Buhler James , Newton Alex
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay analyzes the Bourne trilogy and discusses how both image and soundtrack are symptoms of an underlying cultural trauma. An introduction considers the relationship of soundtrack rendering to digital aesthetics. The essay then examines how music underscores the basic duality of Jason Bourne, a duality born of this trauma and which music elevates to myth. Next, the essay looks at the intersection between the striking visual techniques and the sound design in The Bourne Ultimatum and argues that the audiovisual style matches the film’s thematics. In the concluding section, the essay returns to the issue of trauma and explores the law of action that regulates the action genre and the social trauma that it attempts to conceal.
Visualizing the App Album with Björk’s Biophilia
Authors: Dibben Nicola
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. Digitalization has brought profound changes to the way people make and experience music. This essay examines the implications of the mobile app format for audiovisual aesthetics through a case study of Björk’s Biophilia (2011). A number of consequences and opportunities of this new format are identified: new aesthetic and pedagogical implications of music visualization, immersive versus “distributed” modes of listening, interactivity and multisensory experience of music, and the creation of a curated artistic vision that counters the fragmentation and lack of multimedia experience associated with prevalent practices of music consumption via MP3 download. The essay ends by considering the relationship to interactive video, computer games, and the physical music artefact, arguing that mobile music apps are (re)introducing interactivity and multimodality into the experience of recorded music.
Accelerated Aesthetics
Authors: Vernallis Carol
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay argues that contemporary digital media present forms of space, time, and rhythm that we haven’t seen. These new forms bear some similarities to contemporary experiences like work speedup, multitasking, and just-in-time labor. One can only guess why this is happening and its causes and effects. A Frankfurt School perspective might note that forms of entertainment replicate labor so we can better toil under oppressive conditions. Marshall McLuhan might claim that the digital has infiltrated entertainment, finance, and labor; hence, there’s a homology between them. This essay suggests that both perspectives grasp something: becoming more aware of the patterns of space, time, and rhythm in media and in work speedup might help us to adapt to social change. We might even work to train our forms of attention so that we can handle the shocks of contemporary society with more grace, care, and awareness.
Understanding the Pleasures of War’s Audiovision
Authors: Sumera Matthew
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This chapter seeks to explain the potency and appeal of music in contemporary war representations. Through the close analysis of war music videos—amateur productions, set to some form of popular music and posted online—the chapter addresses the ways in which music has become a generative, affective force in countless war depictions. In examining the ways in which such videos circulate, including how soldiers create, discuss, and use them, the chapter ultimately argues that these contemporary audiovisions are not about war as much as they are part of it.
Sonic Times in Watchmen and Inception
Authors: Wood Aylish
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. In Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009) and Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), characters navigate the unusual spatiotemporal realities of fourth dimensional time and multiple-level dreams. The sound designs of each film shift between seamless and overt organizations, inviting audiences to also experience unstable spatio-temporalities. As the sound and image relations mediate between both coherent action and also potentially destabilized spatiotemporal realities, they work to hold contradictory tendencies in balance. The argument made in this essay is that sound bridges contribute to the transmission of knowledge about the unusual spatiotemporal realities of Inception and Watchmen. Even as the soundtrack is seamless in the sense that its transitions are smoothly achieved, bridging more than one location, the balance of the mix among music, sound effects, and dialogue sits unusually with the images. Consequently, the sound-image relations coordinate and generate a perspective on time and space.
Inglo(u)rious Basterdization? Tarantino and the War Movie Mashup
Authors: Mera Miguel
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay explores ways in which mashup principles are applied in Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds, where multiple references do not just emphasize counterpoint or defamiliarization through ironic parallelism, but, more importantly, seek pluralism, the true goal of mashup culture. The film was heavily critiqued for rewriting the ending of World War II and creating an alternate version of the Holocaust. Tarantino’s use of preexisting music by Ennio Morricone, and especially references from the spaghetti western subgenre, allow historical liberties to become a reflection on the metamorphosis of fact into myth and force the audience to confront its own spectatorial position. Inglourious Basterds ultimately problematizes the nature of historical (mis)representation in war movies.
Virtual and Visceral Experience in Music-Oriented Video Games
Authors: Miller Kiri
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This chapter investigates the digital games Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and DJ Hero, all of which aim to integrate kinesthetic engagement with audiovisual experience. Game designers have long understood that mutually reinforcing audio and visual stimuli set the stage for immersive gameplay. These music-oriented games go a step further by making physical engagement with the game controller meaningful and viscerally persuasive: whereas most games draw players into the on-screen gameworld, allowing them to master and forget the controller in their hands, these games draw attention to the controller as instrument and the living room as performance space. Through a comparative analysis of game reception, this essay shows how compelling gameplay experiences rely on prior musical and cultural knowledge.
The Sonic Summons
Authors: Kara Selmin
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay analyzes the contemplations on nature in the experimental documentary works of Abbas Kiarostami and Aleksandr Sokurov from within a media ecological framework. Coupling the aesthetic strategies of long-take cinema with abstract, eremetic meditations on nature and ambient soundtracks, the works of these directors shift the focus of documentary from increased connectivity to reimagined connections among humans, technology, and nature in the digital era. With an emphasis on the sound composition of especially two films, Five (2003) and Confession (1998), the essay situates Kiarostami and Sokurov’s return to tropes of nature within the metaphysical turn in the humanities in recent years, which seeks to formulate a philosophy of nature that can respond to contemporary ecological sensibilities.
Lost in Sensation
Authors: Whittington William
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This essay argues that sound processes, design practices, and technology have shaped the history and trajectory of digital media in significant and all-to-often unacknowledged ways. Specifically, sound design strategies have helped define the “hyperrealistic” approach that has come to define the style of digital media, establishing unprecedented image and sound unity. Sound has also taken the lead in establishing new forms of “spectacle” and “immersion” through the use of multichannel technologies, which have fostered new cinematic reading codes and considerations in regard to subjectivity. Within the digital “revolution,” the soundtrack offers a quiet revolution of its own, if we just listen.
Public Screens and Urban Life
Authors: Straw Will
Published: February 2014

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. This response to Sean Cubitt’s “Large Screens, Third Screens, Virtuality, and Innovation”looks at urban screens in relation to two key developments in the history of urban modernity. One of these is the expansion of electric lighting in cities from the nineteenth century onward.In what historians have called “nocturnalization,” cities have seen an expansion of the cultural and social uses of the urban night. Another development is the growth of urban transportation systems, wherein screens work both to distract travellers from the physical experience of travel and to offer forms of information, entertainment, or advertising. As media from newspapers to public screens books and digital tabloids have come to fill the social space of cities, they have engaged the look of viewer-citizens in a variety of novel and culturally significant ways.
Phonology
Authors: Hellmuth Sam
Published: February 2014

Phonology is the study of systematic patterning in the distribution and realization of speech sounds within and across language varieties. Arabic phonology features heavily in the work of the Arab grammarians, most notably in the Kitaab of Sibawayh. Sibawayh provides phonetic descriptions of the articulation of individual speech sounds, which are accompanied by an analysis of the patterning of sounds in Arabic, which is indisputably phonological in nature. This article sets out five important strands of phonological research on Arabic, taking in work on the language-particular phonological properties of Arabic as well as research that exploits fine-grained variation among spoken varieties of Arabic for theoretical gain. The discussion is structured to move from segmental phonology (the properties of individual speech sounds) to suprasegmental phonology (the properties of larger domains such as the syllable, word, or phrase).
Arabic Linguistic Tradition I
Authors: Baalbaki Ramzi
Published: February 2014

The Arabic linguistic tradition (also termed Arabic grammatical tradition) is the most extensive among the Arabic linguistic sciences. This article focuses on the two major branches of the grammatical tradition: nahw (which refers to grammar in general but more specifically to syntax); and sarf (morphology). Sections of the article cover early grammar and the origins of the grammatical theory, early works and Sibawayhi’s Kitaab, grammar from the 3rd/9th century onward, and the study of morphology in the Arabic linguistic tradition.
The Syntax of Arabic From A Generative Perspective
Authors: Benmamoun Elabbas , Choueiri Lina
Published: February 2014

Research on Arabic varieties within modern syntactic approaches has tracked the debates that have preoccupied the field of generative linguistics in its different incarnations throughout the last six decades. The debates centered on the nature of linguistic categories, syntactic configurations and their constituents, syntactic alternations and processes that alter the order of constituents, and dependencies between members of the syntactic representations. This article considers the main issues within Arabic syntax and the influential approaches that have been advanced. It focuses on debates surrounding phrase structure and word order, the syntax of the noun phrase, subjects and subject agreement, negation, long A’-dependencies, and wh-in situ constructions.
The Philological Approach to Arabic Grammar
Authors: Edzard Lutz
Published: February 2014

This article is devoted to the philological analysis of selected features of Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic as well as selected features of Middle Arabic. The sections on the writing system and phonology as well as morphology are held rather brief, as the aspect of “cultural embeddedness” seems to be less relevant in these realms of grammar. First and foremost, it reflects a nonexhaustive overview of some cases or even causes célèbres in Arabic syntax and semantics. The article concludes with a short philological analysis of a Middle Arabic (here: Judeo-Arabic) text.
Borrowing
Authors: Kossmann Maarten
Published: February 2014

This article discusses borrowing—mainly lexical borrowing—in relation to Arabic. It first provides a brief introduction to early loans in Arabic. Then it considers borrowing in written Arabic, before dealing with borrowing in spoken Arabic. The literature on this subject is vast, corresponding to the large geographical area and many languages involved in contact with Arabic. The article therefore offers typologies of the linguistic processes by which the borrowing out of and into Arabic can be understood without claiming comprehensiveness.
The Arabic Writing System
Authors: Daniels Peter
Published: February 2014

This article discusses the Arabic writing system. It begins with linguistic description of the components of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic writing, followed by accounts of their use to represent the language and of the use of the script as art and in technology. The article concludes with summaries of both the past and prospects of the script.
What Is Arabic?
Authors: Retsö Jan
Published: February 2014

This article addresses what we mean today by the term Arabic: the whole complex of spoken languages from Oman to Morocco, from southern Turkey to Chad, including almost the entire Arabian Peninsula. Which are the purely linguistic criteria on which our modern use of the term is based? Which are the isoglosses that set it apart from other Semitic languages? The modern concept of Arabic, which argues that it encompasses both Arabiyya and modern vernaculars, is not meaningful as a pure linguistic concept. Searching through the phonology and morphology of the complex we call Arabic today, it seems impossible to find anything that delimits the group from other Semitic languages in a meaningful way. From a purely linguistic viewpoint, the Arabic complex is dissolved into a large variety of languages that in varying degrees have elements in common with each other as well as with other Semitic languages.
The Arabic Literary Language
Authors: Newman Daniel
Published: February 2014

This article discusses the developments in formal written Arabic in the early Modern period, which started with Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of Egypt (1798–1802), when the Arab Muslim world first came into direct contact with the West. The article first discusses the emergence and development of Modern Standard Arabic. Then it details the calls for language reform and revival, spurred by widening political and financial encroachments of Western powers all over the Muslim world. Finally, the article describes the establishment of language institutions aimed at preserving the language from foreign terms. It shows that the existence of multiple normative institutions was inherently self-defeating. Driven by political and ideological reasons, it resulted in petty rivalries between the various organizations, each vying for authority.
The Employment Impact of Casino Gambling in the U.S.
Authors: Anders Gary
Published: February 2014

Casino gambling has become a popular economic development strategy. This chapter examines the impact of casinos on employment as determined by an econometric analysis of state-level data for eight industries. The results suggest that the opening of casinos leads to employment increases in the arts and entertainment, accommodations, and food and beverage industries. At the same time, it leads to decreases in employment in management and professional services, technology, and manufacturing. Also evident is the impact of demographic changes and computer technology. These findings suggest that the expansion of commercial gaming has a positive effect on regional employment in some sectors while having a negative effect in other sectors, especially in those states with competing gambling venues.
The Economics of Casino Taxation
Authors: Anderson John E.
Published: February 2014

This chapter examines how governments in many nations and regions tax casino gambling and also considers the economic effects of that taxation. The first section analyzes the nature of casino gambling, along with the forms of taxation that governments apply to casino operations, including wagering taxes, admissions taxes, fees, and other taxes. Section 2 examines the economics of casino taxation, including market analysis of a casino game, efficiency effects of casino game taxation, equity impacts or the incidence of casino taxation, and optimal government tax policy regarding casinos. Section 3 provides a summary of the forms of taxation used around the world, highlighting major gambling locations, such as Las Vegas, Macau (Macao), and Singapore, among others.
The Efficiency of Soccer Betting Markets
Authors: Goddard John
Published: February 2014

This chapter evaluates the performance of forecasting models of the efficiency of soccer betting markets. A nontechnical description of a forecasting model is provided, based on a large-scale number-crunching exercise using historical match results and other relevant data. It also examines whether forecasting models of this kind can provide the basis for the development of profitable fixed-odds betting strategies. A prior hypothesis is that opportunities for profitable betting that were available during earlier periods might have been largely eliminated by the increased sophistication of contemporary sports betting markets, greatly enhanced by advances in computing technology.
The Efficiency of Pelota Betting Markets
Authors: Llorente Loreto , Aizpurua Josemari , Puértolas Javier
Published: February 2014

In pelota matches, which are games with two mutually exclusive and exhaustive outcomes, wagers on the winner are made between viewers through a middleman who receives 16 percent of the payout. This chapter presents an analysis of this betting market under three different concepts of market efficiency widely utilized in the literature. Attention is then turned to another concept of market efficiency with the preliminary analysis of a set of field data. Finally, some insights are provided for future research on hedging strategies in these markets.
Insider Trading in Betting Markets
Authors: Schnytzer Adi
Published: February 2014

The focus of this chapter is the racing betting market, notably the gallops, harness, and greyhounds. A key issue is whether the presence of betting insiders at the track implies that their presence is easily measured. It is shown that this is a function of the microstructure of the particular betting market. In some markets, the impact of insider trading is readily measured, while in others, it has hitherto proven virtually impossible. The different microstructures of betting markets and the implications for insider trading and its measurement are considered.
Pricing Decisions and Insider Trading in Fixed-Odds Horse Betting Markets
Authors: Schnytzer Adi , Makropoulou Vasiliki , Lamers Martien
Published: February 2014

This chapter conceptualizes fixed-odds horse betting markets as implicit call option markets. The decision-making process of a bookmaker is a model that sets prices under uncertainty, showing that when a bookmaker follows this pricing process built on implicit options the returns will exhibit a favorite-longshot bias. By performing Monte Carlo simulations, option values are generated and a measurement made of the degree of insider trading.
Betting on Simultaneous Events and Accumulator Gambles
Authors: Grant Andrew
Published: February 2014

As bettors become more sophisticated, there is an increasing focus on bankroll risk management or how much to bet on certain opportunities. Bettors often face situations where multiple games are played simultaneously. Thus, the problem of allocating capital across different games or events must be considered, much the same as an investor allocating capital to different stocks in a portfolio. In this chapter, the use of accumulator bets (parlays) as part of a portfolio betting strategy is explored.
A Primer on the Mathematics of Gambling
Authors: Hannum Robert C.
Published: February 2014

A mathematical analysis of gambling can explain why over time , one player wins and another loses. In the context of commercial gaming the “player” who wins is typically the house?the operators of the casino, racetrack, card room, or lottery. Simply put, commercial gaming enterprises generate a profit due to the mathematics behind the games. As many experienced gamblers have learned—for better or worse—and some knowledgeable insiders have voiced, “There is no such thing as luck; it is all mathematics.” This chapter presents the fundamental mathematics of gambling and shows how the math behind the games generates revenues and drives the economics of gambling.
Betting Motivation and Behavior
Authors: Bruce Alistair
Published: February 2014

This chapter is concerned with exploring individuals’ motivations for betting and other aspects of their behavior as bettors. These topics have generated a substantial literature over the past four decades. While the study of betting behavior has been dominated by the lens of economic analysis, it has also garnered the attention of psychologists, sociologists, and those interested in designing the legal and regulatory regimes within which betting takes place or those tasked with addressing and treating the negative effects of excessive exposure to betting from a medical or social care perspective.
Evidence of Biased Decision-Making in Betting Markets
Authors: McDonald David , Sung Ming-Chien , Johnson Johnnie
Published: February 2014

Betting markets constitute naturalistic decision-making environments, which offer great potential for helping to understand individuals’ decision-making behavior. These markets feature many of the aspects of real-world decision environments. In particular, they are associated with rich, dynamic information sets, offer strong incentives to participants for success, require the commitment of the individual’s own resources, and involve repeated trials offering significant potential for learning. This chapter provides a survey of previous studies that have employed betting markets of various kinds to investigate decisions made by bettors, with particular reference to systematic biases that were first identified in the laboratory.
A Simple Automated Market Maker for Prediction Markets
Authors: Johnstone David
Published: February 2014

There is wide scope for reliance on automated “robot” market makers in prediction markets and market simulation games in experimental economics and behavioral finance. The market maker presented here is an alternative to the well-known but less easily understood Hanson market maker. It has the advantage of being easy to derive and makes a good mathematical introduction to the logic of automated bid and ask price–setting in prediction markets. Its main advantage is that the opening security price can be set arbitrarily between zero and one, so as to match the market maker’s prior beliefs. A weakness of the Hanson market maker is that it opens automatically with a uniform prior distribution. In many real-world applications, this is unrealistic and prone to cause the market maker unnecessary trading losses (on average). Common practice, such as in betting markets and over-the-counter financial markets for binaries, is to set opening prices based on expert subjective probabilities.
The Efficiency Of Lottery Markets
Authors: Forrest David , Gulley O. David
Published: February 2014

This chapter analyzes the degree to which lottery players demonstrate rational behavior and how they use available information to make decisions about participation and level of play. Overall, players of lotto games act as if they understand the rules of the game and appropriately use relevant information about the games. Exceptions to efficiency are found, but these inefficiencies cannot be easily exploited by bettors.
The Economics Of Lotteries: A Survey Of The Literature
Authors: Grote Kent , Matheson Victor A.
Published: February 2014

This chapter surveys the literature on the economics of lotteries and is organized around two central themes. The first section examines the microeconomic aspects of lotteries, including consumer decision-making under uncertainty, price and income elasticities of demand for lottery tickets, cross-price elasticities of lottery tickets to each other and to other gambling products, consumer rationality and gambling, and the efficiency of lottery markets. The second section covers topics related to public finance and public choice, including the revenue potential of lotteries, the tax efficiency and dead-weight loss of lottery games, the horizontal and vertical equity of lotteries, earmarking and the fungibility of lottery revenues, and individual state decisions to participate in participate in public lotteries.
Research Design and Methods
Authors: Reznick J. Steven
Published: February 2014

This chapter addresses problematic aspects of contemporary research in developmental psychology that impede progress toward the goal of establishing a cumulative developmental science. One key perspective is the importance of recognizing the need to balance the theoretical relevance of sense meaning with the objective measurement of reference meaning and to adopt optimal strategies for combining measurements reflecting multiple attempts, operations, and levels. It is also efficacious to use qualitative information from the context of discovery as a complement and guide to improve the efficacy of quantitative research in the context of justification. Various methodological issues are addressed, including sample selection, design, anchoring of findings, research on atypical participants and interventions, issues related to observing behavior, missing data, nonlinear effects, inferring causality, and assessing statistical significance. Long-term strategies for enhancing developmental research include better analytic techniques and data warehousing and explicit efforts to improve research methodology.
Behavioral Genetics, Genetics, and Epigenetics
Authors: Moore David S.
Published: February 2014

When considering how “nature” and “nurture” contribute to development, psychologists often take the former to mean “influenced by genes.” Traditionally, behavioral geneticists have used twin and adoption studies to assess the extent of genetic influence on various behaviors. Recently, the heritability statistics these studies generate have been criticized as meaningless, partly because biologists have established that genes cannot influence development independently of environmental factors; genetic and nongenetic factors always cooperate to build traits. This chapter considers genetic contributions to some psychological characteristics, thereby demonstrating what genes can and cannot do. New discoveries regarding the control of genes via epigenetic mechanisms are of interest to developmental psychologists because they have the potential to reveal how environments and genes interact, help us understand certain behavioral disorders, and illuminate normal psychological processes like learning and memory; in addition, they cast doubt on the neo-Darwinian dogma that ancestors’ experiences cannot influence descendants’ development. Advances in genetics have clarified how molecular factors contribute to psychological characteristics and indicated that all of our characteristics are influenced by developmental circumstances.
Auditory and Musical Development
Authors: Trainor Laurel J. , He Chao
Published: February 2014

The development of auditory perception is examined in relation to (1) identity and location of objects (auditory scene analysis) and (2) musical structure and meaning. Behavioral and brain research converges to indicate that some capacity to process the frequency, pitch, intensity, timbre, location, and timing of sounds is present very early in development, although there is a protracted experience-driven period of plasticity, with adult levels of maturity typically not reached until well in to childhood. Young infants are also able to process aspects of musical structure. At the same time, enculturation to the specific melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure of the musical system of a person’s culture depends on the considerable exposure to that musical system experienced by all members of the culture, and intensive musical training affects the speed and degree of that enculturation.
The Development of Reaching Actions
Authors: Savelsbergh Geert , van der Kamp John , van Wermeskerken Margot
Published: February 2014

The development of reaching actions in infancy is addressed by examining how visual perception is interwoven with movement coordination and control. Framed within the ideas of ecological psychology and the constraint-led approach, it is demonstrated that the development of reaching actions involves multiple interacting constraints such as maturation of the central nervous system, biomechanical factors, and informational constraints. None of these constraints uniquely prescribes the developmental trajectory, nor has one of them logical priority. In accordance with the central tenet of the ecological approach, we emphasize the role of visual information in the development of action. These findings are integrated within recent neuropsychological evidence for the existence of functionally and neuroanatomically separate visual systems.
Memory
Authors: Bauer Patricia J.
Published: February 2014

Memory is a multidimensional construct that is evident from very early in life yet undergoes a protracted course of development. The chapter features elaboration of the construct of memory with emphasis on distinctions between short- and long-term memory and between conscious and unconscious forms of memory. It also features discussion of data on developmental changes in different types of memory, including priming, short-term and working memory, deliberate and strategic memory, and episodic and autobiographical memory. Emphasis is placed on mechanisms of age-related change, including development of the neural structures and networks subserving memory; changes in the basic mnemonic processes of encoding, consolidation and storage, and retrieval; and conceptual development and knowledge change; as well as on social influences on remembering.
Concepts in Development
Authors: Gelman Susan A.
Published: February 2014

This chapter addresses what children’s concepts reveal about classic debates in developmental psychology. It is argued that throughout development, concepts are multifaceted, reflecting their varied functions. As a result, children’s concepts (a) are early emerging but undergo qualitative change, (b) obey domain-general principles yet are embedded in domain-specific knowledge structures, (c) are actively constructed but deeply informed by input, (d) are flexible but constrained, and (e) include both statistics and theory. The interplay between different levels of analysis, different sources of knowledge, and different developmental processes may itself provide an important engine for conceptual growth and change.