springer berlin springer international publishing springer jun 2018 (128 risultati)

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book explores the issue of student speech in public schools from a student usability perspective. Student speech is both a challenge and an opportunity in public schools. When school boards and districts craft policy, they do so with US Supreme Court precedents, state laws, and community expectations in mind. The result is complex ideas presented in complex speech. What do student handbooks say about free speech, if anything at all How are these rights defined, and how is the language interpreted Salkin and Shenkel explore these questions by analyzing a sample of public high school student handbooks from across the country. Drawing from the results, the project proposes real-world suggestions for schools seeking to create student expression handbook language that is easily accessible to the audience it seeks to serve. 79 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Self-interest is an important human motive and this book explores its evolution in the United States and its consequences for politics, business, and personal relationships. In the postwar era American understandings of self-interest have moved away from Alexis de Tocqueville's concept of 'self-interest well-understood' - in which people recognize that their interests are served by the success of the community of which they are part - towards 'individualism' - by which he meant narrow framing that often leads people to pursue their interests at the expense of the community. The book documents this evolution through qualitative and quantitative content analysis of presidential speeches, television sitcoms and popular music, before exploring its negative consequences for democracy. 125 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book examines the formation of identity of the Nagas in northeast India in light of the proselytizing efforts by the Americans and the colonization by the British in their search for control over areas inhabited by the Nagas which were perfect for tea plantations. The author explores the westernization of Naga culture, its effect on the Naga Nationalist movement, and how it has led to the formation of modern Naga identity. As a unique indigenous group, the colonization of the Naga people offers fresh insights into our understanding of the processes and effects of colonization in India, as well as its long-term negative effects, particularly with regards to the preservation of traditional beliefs and customs. 137 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This far-sighted volume describes emerging trends and challenges in university-level social sciences education in an era marked by globalization, austerity, and inequity. It spotlights solution-focused and interdisciplinary methods of teaching, developed to match influential academic ideas, such as self-directed learning and learning in communities, as students seek to engage with and improve conditions in their immediate environments. Chapters offer real-world applications of foundational concepts in the modern practice of teaching, learning, and curriculum development. Accordingly, the editors emphasize the relationship between pedagogy and curriculum, as both are critical in encouraging student autonomyand promoting optimum academic and societal outcomes.Included in the coverage: Towards a concept of solution-focused teaching: learning in communities. Heutagogy and the emerging curriculum. Collaborative working in the statutory and voluntary sectors. Delivering a community development curriculum to students with multiple identities. Photography and teaching in community development. A model for change: sharing ideas and strategies.The Pedagogy of the Social Sciences Curriculum will inspire sociologists, social workers, and health and sociology educators to take a deeper role in community well-being as students, faculty, and communities collaborate to make lasting contributions to society. 123 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book addresses synergy management, which poses an important challenge for firms, advisors and practitioners involved in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Synergy plays a key role in M&A contexts, both in the decision-making process and, subsequently, in the integration phase. However, despite the fact that synergy value is commonly regarded as one of the key success factors in M&A, research shows that firms generally fail to achieve the expected synergy. The extant literature is characterized by a lack of comprehensive models of synergy management: the assessment of synergy value remains a 'black box' for scholars and practitioners alike. The authors provide a comprehensive framework for synergy management by integrating findings from prior research and various disciplines. The framework highlights the main dimensions of synergy management in mergers and acquisitions, common pitfalls, and new models and tools for avoiding them. As such, the book enriches the M&A literature, offers new insights for scholars, and provides valuable guidelines for practitioners involved in synergy management. 91 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Analyzing the role of creative industries, this book explores regional development within the economic cycle. Using the Greek region of Epirus as an in-depth case study, the authors identify the main opportunities for the region's development as well as the necessary conditions and constraints to achieve future economic growth. The last decade has seen creative industries receive growing attention from researchers, leading to an increasing body of analysis, studies and statistics. Despite this, they remain to be poorly understood and thus underestimated by many societies and policy makers, including those in the Greek economy. Creative Industries in Greece provides a close study of this sector and disseminates its best practices to examine its strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. 116 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book provides an accessible and timely analysis of how the British discourse on Europe has evolved over the past forty years. It focuses on three key episodes: the 1975 referendum on the UK's continued membership of the European Economic Community; the 1992-3 debates on ratification of the Maastricht Treaty; and the more recent proto-referendum debates sparked by David Cameron's Bloomberg speech in January 2013. Using a discourse-analytical approach, the book analyses how political and media voices seek to delineate a British sense of self from a Continental other. Importantly, the book also pays close attention to the rising prominence of immigration issues within the British discourse on Europe. 126 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book critically interrogates three sets of distortions that emanate from the messianic core of 21st century public discourse on LGBT+ rights in the United States. The first relates to the critique of pinkwashing, often advanced by scholars who claim to be committed to an emancipatory politics. The second concerns a recent US Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), a judgment that established marriage equality across the 50 states. The third distortion occurs in Kenji Yoshino's theorization of the concept of gay covering. Each distortion produces its own injunction to assimilate, sometimes into the dominant mainstream and, at other times, into the fold of what is axiomatically taken to be the category of the radical. Using a queer theoretic analysis, De-Moralizing Gay Rights argues for the dismantling of each of these three sets of assimilationist injunctions. 112 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book investigates the relationship between the self and screen in the digital age, and examines how the notion of the self is re-negotiated and curated online. The chapters examine the production of the self in postmodernity through digital platforms by employing key concepts of ubiquity, the everyday, disembodiment and mortality. It locates self-production through ubiquitous imaging of the self and our environments with and through mobile technologies and in terms of its 'embeddedness' in our everyday lives. In this innovative text, Yasmin Ibrahim explores technology's co-location on our corporeal body, our notions of domesticity and banality, our renewed relationship with the screen and our enterprise with capital as well as the role of desire in the formation of the self. The result is a richly interdisciplinary volume that seeks to examine the formation of the self online, through its renewed negotiations with personalised technologies and with the emergence of social networking sites. 104 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book analyzes narrations embedded in political disputes, allowing readers to gain a deeper understanding of modern political reality. The author explores this theme in readings of the Sophocles tragedyAntigone, theMelian Dialogueof Thucydides, Heinrich von Kleist's novellaMichael Kohlhaas, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitorand E.L. Doctorow'sRagtime novel, taking into account the relevant interdisciplinary aspects of the narratives. His study of these four narrations focuses on key political concepts, such as might and right, self-interest, legality and justice, the nation-state and democracy, and relates them compellingly to current actuality. Since narrations can exert comprehensive and lasting influence on individuals' political discernment, this systematic analysis allows for a better comprehension of politics in education and civics. 123 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Social choice theory deals with aggregating the preferences of multiple individuals regarding several available alternatives, a situation colloquially known as voting.There are many different voting rules in use and even more in the literature, owing to the various considerations such an aggregation method should take into account. The analysis of voting scenarios becomes particularly challenging in the presence of strategic voters, that is, voters that misreport their true preferences in an attempt to obtain a more favorable outcome. In a world that is tightly connected by the Internet, where multiple groups with complex incentives make frequent joint decisions, the interest in strategic voting exceeds the scope of political science and is a focus of research in economics, game theory, sociology, mathematics, and computer science.The book has two parts. The first part asks 'are there voting rules that are truthful ' in the sense that all voters have an incentive to report their true preferences. The seminal Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem excludes the existence of such voting rules under certain requirements. From this starting point, we survey both extensions of the theorem and various conditions under which truthful voting is made possible (such as restricted preference domains). We also explore the connections with other problems of mechanism design such as locating a facility that serves multiple users.In the second part, we ask 'what would be the outcome when voters do vote strategically ' rather than trying to prevent such behavior. We overview various game-theoretic models and equilibrium concepts from the literature, demonstrate how they apply to voting games, and discuss their implications on social welfare.We conclude with a brief survey of empirical and experimental findings that could play a key role in future development of game theoretic voting models. 149 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book provides a single-source reference to green technologies in advanced biofuel technology. The main focus is on the description of the state of the art in catalytic processes for the 'green' production of biofuels. The authors describe two different, practical approaches for catalysts, which allow for effective and easy separation of the catalyst by simple filtration, and enable reuse for several cycles. Readers will gain understanding as to the mechanisms involved in the synthesis and structure formation of the catalyst, in order to maximize yield of biodiesel production. The authors also address the question of how catalytic material should be distributed inside a porous support to obtain optimal performance. The effects of physicochemical and operating parameters are analyzed to gain insight into the underlying phenomena governing the performance of optimally designed catalysts. 133 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book provides a thorough treatment of privacy and security issues for researchers in the fields of smart grids, engineering, and computer science. It presents comprehensive insight to understanding the big picture of privacy and security challenges in both physical and information aspects of smart grids. The authors utilize an advanced interdisciplinary approach to address the existing security and privacy issues and propose legitimate countermeasures for each of them in the standpoint of both computing and electrical engineering. The proposed methods are theoretically proofed by mathematical tools and illustrated by real-world examples. 113 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the Second IFIP WG 12.7 International Workshop on Computational History and Data-Driven Humanities, held in Dublin, Ireland, in May 2016.The 7 full papers presented together with 2 invited talks and 4 lightning talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. The papers focus on the challenge and opportunities of data-driven humanities and cover topics at the interface between computer science, social science, humanities, and mathematics. 127 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book describes the various contributions of positron emission tomography (PET) to the management of Hodgkin lymphoma and considers key issues in its use. A full explanation of the value of PET in disease staging and restaging is followed by discussion of its role in guiding individualized, response-adapted therapy in both early and advanced disease based on assessment of treatment sensitivity. Further chapters explore in detail the current application of PET for determination of tumor metabolic volume and planning of involved field radiotherapy. The book concludes by discussing PET scan reporting in clinical practice and the rules that have now been formally set following a number of international workshops designed to develop standard reporting criteria based on expert agreement. The authors are leading authorities who adopt an interdisciplinary approach in covering the most important aspects of the use of PET in Hodgkin lymphoma in a readily understandable way. PET Scan in Hodgkin Lymphoma will be of value to oncologists, hematologists, medical physicists, radiotherapists, and nuclear medicine specialists. 139 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This manuscript discusses the potentials of the approaches as mentioned below to monitor the AIVs in WMW.Molecular diagnostic platforms enable for accurate detection of the AIVs in the feces of infected birds. Similar technologies can be used to determine the bird species through DNA barcoding, enabling non-invasive research on the epidemiology of the disease.Wild migratory waterfowl (WMW) play significant role in the transmission of avian influenza viruses (AIVs) on large distances. Understanding bird migrations may therefore significantly contribute towards understanding of the disease epidemiology, however most conventional approaches to trace WMW migrations are based on capturing, tagging (mostly ringing or GPS devices) and their re-capturing to link the departure and arrival places. Stable isotope ratios in metabolically inert tissues (feathers, beaks, claws) reflect the ratios present at the point of intake (drinking or feeding), thus enabling for tracing bird origins at stopover places. Molecular diagnostic platforms such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) enable for accurate detection of the AIVs in the feces of infected birds. Similar technologies (genetic sequencing) can be used to determine the bird species through DNA barcoding. Simple and easy collection of feather and fecal samples at the stopover places may generate a full information package on which species of WMW carries the AIVs (PCR+DNA barcoding on the feces), as well as the origin of these species (SI+DNA barcoding on the feathers). Therefore, such approaches enable for research on the epidemiology and the ecology of the AIVs in WMW using a non-invasive platform, which does not require capturing of WMW. This manuscript discusses the potentials of these approaches to monitor the AIVs in WMW.p> 49 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book presents a thorough analysis of newly available sinusoidal three-phase windings in electrical machines, which provide many benefits over traditional windings, including energy savings, noise and vibration reduction, and reduced need for non-ferrous metals. The author's instruction on the implementation of this innovative optimization will be quite useful to researchers, developers and producers of electrical machines, as well as students mastering electromechanics. 100 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume compiles five papers modeling the effects of neoliberal economics on the emergence of Ebola and its aftermath. Neoliberalism is currently the world's primary economic philosophy. It centers international relations around globalizing laissez-faire economics for multinational companies, promoting free trade, deregulating economic markets, and shifting state expenditures in favor of private property. The multidisciplinary teams represented here place both Ebola Makona, the Zaire Ebola virus variant that has infected 28,000 in West Africa, and Ebola Reston, which is currently emerging in industrial hog farms in the Philippines and China, within a multi-plank modeling framework. Using a stochastic extinction model that one group spatializes, environmental stochasticity across the ecologies in which Ebola evolves is treated as an ecosystemic prophylaxis. An agroecological logic gate is developed for epidemic control. A Black-Scholes model explicitly links economic margins across agricultural systems to success in biocontrol. This new control theory is further developed around the data-rate and rate-distortion theorems, a turbulence model, and cognitive symmetry breaking. Lastly, a model of pandemic penetrance is used to explore the domino effects of serious outbreaks amplifying through the cascades of disasters that can follow deadly pandemics. All the models presented are contextualized by socioeonomic geographies specific to outbreak locales.Together the models suggest shifts in regional agroeconomics under the neoliberal doctrine, driving deforestation and monoculture production, destroying the ecosystemic 'friction' with which local forests typically disrupt Ebola transmission. The resulting collapse in such an ecological function accelerates pathogen spillover and propagation across the remaining host populations. The failure on the part of current control efforts to assimilate such a structural context may render even an efficacious vaccine dysfunctional. The authors propose an alternate science of disease and an adjunct program of interventions useful to researchers and public health officials alike. 96 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book introduces readers to various radiation soft-error mechanisms such as soft delays, radiation induced clock jitter and pulses, and single event (SE) coupling induced effects. In addition to discussing various radiation hardening techniques for combinational logic, the author also describes new mitigation strategies targeting commercial designs. Coverage includes novel soft error mitigation techniques such as the Dynamic Threshold Technique and Soft Error Filtering based on Transmission gate with varied gate and body bias. The discussion also includes modeling of SE crosstalk noise, delay and speed-up effects. Various mitigation strategies to eliminate SE coupling effects are also introduced. Coverage also includes the reliability of low power energy-efficient designs and the impact of leakage power consumption optimizations on soft error robustness. The author presents an analysis of various power optimization techniques, enabling readers to make design choices that reduce static power consumption and improve soft error reliability at the same time. 105 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book discusses new, efficient and hardware realizable algorithms that can attain the performance of beyond 5G wireless communication. The authors explain topics gradually, stepping from basic MIMO detection to optimized schemes for both hard and soft domain MIMO detection and also to the feasible VLSI implementation, scalable to any MIMO configuration (including massive MIMO, used in satellite/space communication). The techniques described in this book enable readers to implement real designs, with reduced computational complexity and improved performance. 64 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book provides a comprehensive guide to analyzing and solving optimal design problems in continuousmedia by means of the so-called sub-relaxation method. Though the underlying ideas are borrowed from other,more classical approaches, here they are used and organized in a novel way, yielding a distinct perspective on how to approach this kind of optimization problems.Starting with a discussion of the background motivation, the book broadly explains the sub-relaxation method in general terms, helping readers to grasp, from the very beginning, the driving idea and where the text is heading. In addition to the analyticalcontent of the method, it examines practical issues like optimality and numerical approximation.Though the primary focus is on the development of the method for the conductivity context, the book's final two chapters explore several extensions of the method to other problems, as well as formal proofs.The text can be used for a graduate course in optimal design, even if the method would require some familiaritywith the main analytical issues associated with this type of problems. This can be addressed with the help of the provided bibliography. 130 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th InternationalConference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects, AMDO 2018, heldin Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in July 2018.The 12 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 26submissions. The papers address the following topics: advancedcomputer graphics and immersive videogames; human modeling andanimation; human motion analysis and tracking; 3D human reconstructionand recognition; multimodal user interaction and applications;ubiquitous and social computing; design tools; input technology;programming user interfaces; 3D medical deformable models andvisualization; deep learning methods for computer vision and graphics; and multibiometric. 131 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -Many different fractal dimensions have been proposed for networks. In A Survey of Fractal Dimensions of Networks the theory and computation of the most important of these dimensions are reviewed, including the box counting dimension, the correlation dimension, the mass dimension, the transfinite fractal dimension, the information dimension, the generalized dimensions (which providea way to describe multifractals), and the sandbox method (for approximating the generalized dimensions). The book describes the use of diameter-based and radius-based boxes, and presents several heuristic methods for box counting, including greedy coloring, random sequential node burning, and a method for computing a lower bound. We also discuss very recent results on resolving ambiguity in the calculation of the information dimension and the generalized dimensions, and on the non-monotonicity of the generalized dimensions.Anyone interested in the theory and application of networks will want to read this Brief. This includes anyone studying, e.g., social networks, telecommunications networks, transportation networks, ecological networks, food chain networks, network models of the brain, or financial networks. 84 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book presents the role of mesostructure on the properties of composite materials. A complex percolation model is developed for the material structure containing percolation clusters of phases and interior boundaries. Modeling of technological cracks and the percolation in the Sierpinski carpet are described. The interaction of mesoscopic interior boundaries of the material, including the fractal nature of interior boundaries, the oscillatory nature of it interaction and also the stochastic model of the interior boundaries' interaction, the genesis, structure, and properties are discussed. One of part of the book introduces the percolation model of the long-range effect which is based on the notion on the multifractal clusters with transforming elements, and the theorem on the field interaction of multifractals is described. In addition small clusters, their characteristic properties and the criterion of stability are presented. 107 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This monograph examines rotation sets under the multiplication by d (mod 1) map and their relation to degree d polynomial maps of the complex plane. These sets are higher-degree analogs of the corresponding sets under the angle-doubling map of the circle, which played a key role in Douady and Hubbard's work on the quadratic family and the Mandelbrot set. Presenting the first systematic study of rotation sets, treating both rational and irrational cases in a unified fashion, the text includes several new results on their structure, their gap dynamics, maximal and minimal sets, rigidity, and continuous dependence on parameters. This abstract material is supplemented by concrete examples which explain how rotation sets arise in the dynamical plane of complex polynomial maps and how suitable parameter spaces of such polynomials provide a complete catalog of all such sets of a given degree. As a main illustration, the link between rotation sets of degree 3 and one-dimensional families of cubic polynomials with a persistent indifferent fixed point is outlined.The monograph will benefit graduate students as well as researchers in the area of holomorphic dynamics and related fields. 124 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book proposes a semi-discrete version of the theory of Petitot and Citti-Sarti, leading to a left-invariant structure over the group SE(2,N) , restricted to a finite number of rotations. This apparently very simple group is in fact quite atypical: it is maximally almost periodic, which leads to much simpler harmonic analysis compared to SE(2) . Based upon this semi-discrete model, the authors improve on previous image-reconstruction algorithms and develop a pattern-recognition theory that also leads to very efficient algorithms in practice. 113 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book is a compact study of Kafka's inimitable literary style, animals, and ecological thought-his nonhuman form-that proceeds through original close readings of Kafka's oeuvre. With select engagements of Adorno, Derrida, and the literary heritage from Romanticism to Dickens that influenced Kafka, Ted Geier discusses Kafka's literary, 'nonhuman' form and the way it unsettles the notion of a natural and simple existence that society and culture impose, including the boundaries between human and animal. Through careful attention to the formal predicaments of Kafka's works and engaging with Kafka's original legal and social thought in his novels and short stories, this book renders Kafka's sometimes impossibly enigmatic work legible at the level of its expression, bringing surprising shape to his work and redefining what scholars and readers have understood as the 'Kafkaesque'. 121 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -By meshing psychology with literary analysis, this book inspires us to view the reading of fictional works as an emotional and seductive affair between reader and writer. Arguing that current teaching practices have contributed to the current decline in the study of literature, Jean-François Vernay's plea brings a refreshing perspective by seeking new directions and conceptual tools to highlight the value of literature. Interdisciplinary in focus and relevant to timely discussions of the vitality between emotion and literary studies, particularly within the contexts of psychology, affect studies, and cognitive studies, this book will open up a space in which the formation of our emotions can be openly examined and discussed. 96 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This volume explores why Americans are among the least likely in the world to speak another language and how this U.S. foreign language deficit negatively impacts national and economic security, business and career prospects. Stein-Smith exposes how individuals are disadvantaged through their inability to effectively navigate the global workplace and multicultural communities, how their career options are limited by the foreign language deficit, and even how their ability to enjoy travel abroad and cultural pursuits is diminished. Through exploring the impact of the U.S. foreign language deficit, the author speaks to the stakeholders and partners in the campaign for foreign languages, offering guidance on what can and should be done to address it. She examines the next steps needed to develop specific career pathways that will meet the current and future needs of government, business, and industry, and empower foreign language learners through curriculum and career preparation. 123 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. This item is printed on demand - it takes 3-4 days longer - Neuware -This book reveals the hitherto critically disregarded ludic elements in popular American comedy films, building on and expanding the theories developed by Johan Huizinga in his classic study Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois in Les jeux et les hommes (1958). To address the lack of attention paid to the play principle in film comedy studies, this book focuses exclusively on the elements typical of play that can be found in movies. It introduces two new categories describing play: óneiros and pragma, which allow analysis of how play in comedies is influenced by the relations between the player and non-players. The text is supplemented by the use of the author's drawings, which, because of their analytical and selective nature, are used as a tool for visual study.The play principle has a long tradition in American humor and the films examined here were chosen for their popularity and wide appeal, often acting as vehicles for Hollywood stars (e.g. Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Goldie Hawn, Mike Myers, Jackie Chan or Chris Tucker). The actors' status allowed the filmmakers to construct situations in which the protagonists distanced themselves from the fictional situation. It is argued that the playful detachment from reality, typifying many of the fictional characters portrayed by actors with star status, is characteristic of the play principle in film. Another major consideration is the hotly debated notion of the accomplishment of goals in playful activities, and the book strongly supports the position that in narratives, play can (but does not have to) yield important results. The introduction of the categories of óneiros and pragma in play serves to highlight the complex relation between playfulness and practicality in the films discussed. Building on a comprehensive analysis of the ludic elements in selected popular American comedies, the book makes an important contribution to film studies, providing a unique perspective through its focus on the concept of homo ludens as a comic hero. 97 pp. Englisch.