Last Features

Drawing on archival research and interviews with directors, writers, and editors, Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of German unification. Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of German unification. With leftover GDR funds and under chaotic conditions, a group of young East German filmmakers produced around thirty stylistically diverse films. Most of these films were lost in the political upheaval of the Wende, disappearing until the 2009 Wendeflicks festival in Los Angeles brought them back for an international audience. Now available on DVD, these films provide unique insights into the generational struggle in the DEFA studio, East German youth culture in the 1970s, women directors at DEFA, the relationship between the artist and the state, and the protests of 1989. Last Features focuses in particular on the production group "DaDaeR," the creation of which in 1989 fulfilled a longstanding request by the last generation of DEFA directors for freer production conditions. Drawing onarchival research and interviews with the directors, writers, and editors of the films in question, each chapter examines specific films from the last year of DEFA, contextualizing the analysis of these "last features" with a comprehensive discussion of the directors' overall oeuvres, the historical changes in the studio and the country, and the lasting importance of these films today. Reinhild Steingröver is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

The book will focus on exploiting state of the art research in semantic web and web science. The rapidly evolving world-wide-web has led to revolutionary changes in the whole of society. The research and development of the semantic web covers a number of global standards of the web and cutting edge technologies, such as: linked data, social semantic web, semantic web search, smart data integration, semantic web mining and web scale computing. These proceedings are from the 6th Chinese Semantics Web Symposium.

Arti?cial immune systems (AIS) is a diverse and maturing area of research that bridges the disciplines of immunology and computation. The original research impetus in AIS had a clear focus on applying immunological principles to c- putationalproblemsinpracticaldomainssuchascomputersecurity,datamining and optimization. As the ?eld has matured, it has diversi?ed such that we now see a growing interest in formalizing the theoretical properties of earlier - proaches, elaborating underlying relationships between applied computational models and those from theoretical immunology, as well a return to the roots of the domain in which the methods of computer science are being applied to - munological modelling problems. Following the trends in the ?eld, the ICARIS conference intends to provide a forum for all these perspectives. The 9th InternationalConference on AIS (ICARIS 2010)built on the success of previous years, providing a convenient vantage point for broader re?ection as it returned to Edinburgh, the venue of the Second ICARIS in 2003. This time, the conference was hosted by Edinburgh Napier University at its Craiglockhart Campus, recently reopened after extensive refurbishment which has resulted in a stunning building and state-of-the-art facilities. The extent to which the ?eld has matured over the preceding years is clear; a substantial track of theor- ical research now underpins the discipline. The applied stream has expanded in its outlook, and has examples of AIS algorithms being applied across a wide spectrum of practicalproblems,rangingfrom sensornetworksto semi-conductor design.

This book provides a dispassionate analysis of new religious movements, charting their growth and examining them from a variety of perspectives – sociological, psychological, legal and theological. Saliba then questions whether or not membership harms those who join these new movements and assesses the charge that they 'brainwash' their adherents.

This book is a cultural-historical (rather than purely linguistic) introduction to American English. The first part consists of a general account of variation in American English. It offers concise but comprehensive coverage of such topics as the history of American English; regional, social and ethnic variation; variation in style (including slang); and British and American differences. The second part of the book puts forward an account of how American English has developed into a dominant variety of the English language. It focuses on the ways in which intellectual traditions such as puritanism and republicanism, in shaping the American world view, have also contributed to the distinctiveness of American English.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 33rd annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2011, held in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2010. The 45 revised full papers presented together with 24 poster papers, 17 short papers, and 6 tool demonstrations were carefully reviewed and selected from 223 full research paper submissions and 64 poster/demo submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on text categorization, recommender systems, Web IR, IR evaluation, IR for Social Networks, cross-language IR, IR theory, multimedia IR, IR applications, interactive IR, and question answering /NLP.

Knowledge Mining Using Intelligent Agents explores the concept of knowledge discovery processes and enhances decision-making capability through the use of intelligent agents like ants, termites and honey bees. In order to provide readers with an integrated set of concepts and techniques for understanding knowledge discovery and its practical utility, this book blends two distinct disciplines — data mining and knowledge discovery process, and intelligent agents-based computing (swarm intelligence and computational intelligence). For the more advanced reader, researchers, and decision/policy-makers are given an insight into emerging technologies and their possible hybridization, which can be used for activities like dredging, capturing, distributions and the utilization of knowledge in their domain of interest (i.e. business, policy-making, etc.).By studying the behavior of swarm intelligence, this book aims to integrate the computational intelligence paradigm and intelligent distributed agents architecture to optimize various engineering problems and efficiently represent knowledge from the large gamut of data.

This volume explores higher level, critical, and creative thinking, as well as reflective decision making and problem solving -- what teachers should emphasize when teaching literacy across the curriculum. Focusing on how to encourage learners to become independent thinking, learning, and communicating participants in home, school, and community environments, this book is concerned with integrated learning in a curriculum of inclusion. It emphasizes how to provide a curriculum for students where they are socially interactive, personally reflective, and academically informed. Contributors are authorities on such topics as cognition and learning, classroom climates, knowledge bases of the curriculum, the use of technology, strategic reading and learning, imagery and analogy as a source of creative thinking, the nature of motivation, the affective domain in learning, cognitive apprenticeships, conceptual development across the disciplines, thinking through the use of literature, the impact of the media on thinking, the nature of the new classroom, developing the ability to read words, the bilingual, multicultural learner, crosscultural literacy, and reaching the special learner. The applications of higher level thought to classroom contexts and materials are provided, so that experienced teacher educators, and psychologists are able to implement some of the abstractions that are frequently dealt with in texts on cognition. Theoretical constructs are grounded in educational experience, giving the volume a practical dimension. Finally, appropriate concerns regarding the new media, hypertext, bilingualism, and multiculturalism as they reflect variation in cognitive experience within the contexts of learning are presented.