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This chapter introduces savannahs and looks at their distribution worldwide. It examines the general climatic and physical conditions that produce them. It briefly looks at the Llanos of the Orinoco basin of Venezuela and Columbia, and the cerrado of Brazil. It also looks briefly at the savannahs of northern Australia where eucalyptus and kangaroos replace the acacias, and ungulates of Africa. The chapter concludes with a geographical survey of the major savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa, from the arid savannahs that border the desert regions in the north and south, through the dry savannah and woodland savannahs that run from northern Kenya to northern Botswana, to the forest savannahs that surround the central lowland rainforest of the Congo basin. The influence of temperature and rainfall on the savannahs of Africa are briefly considered, and the action of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone described.

This introductory chapter discusses the four general periods through which the “grammar” of stereographic narrative has evolved. The four periods discussed are the Novelty Period, the Era of Convergence, the Immersive Era, and the era of Digital 3-D Cinema. It also states the main purposes of this book, one of which is to demonstrate the fundamental importance of stereography to the development of motion picture technology.

The disparities—both perceived and real—between US and EU responses to climate change play a central role in defining the political parameters of on-going negotiations over a post-Kyoto agreement. While the EU and the US are only two actors at a sprawling negotiating table increasingly dominated by the rapidly developing economies, they are two of the players whose early expressions of interest and commitment helped shape the framework of the debate as well as the willingness of other key players to come to the table. And, while the EU and the US are often portrayed as sitting at opposite ends of the negotiating table, this depiction is neither accurate nor helpful. This chapter attempts to more thoroughly analyze convergences and divergences in US and EU climate strategies and to begin examining some of the key factors that influence the two regimes' legal and political approaches to climate change.

This chapter proposes that YouTube should be understood as a digital archive with its own developing aesthetic forms where fans act as attentive and specialist curators of a star text. Through an analysis of three Mexican stars from the so-called Golden Age of industrial cinema, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete and Emilio Fernández, this chapter focuses on their YouTube star texts, and draws out what these mean for the nascent field of online re-meditated star studies. It also considers the ways in which the star’s gender determines how fans produce an online star text and how YouTube can be understood to function as a precarious archive.

This chapter considers how the mediation of meaning occurs on a global scale. More specifically, it considers how the global exchange of televisual texts affects citizenship, notions of individualism and choice and the concept of emotion. This chapter refers to debates on cultural imperialism and media imperialism and makes reference to the extensive research that has been done on the popular US television series Dallas. This chapter also discusses convergence in order to consider how new media technologies will influence/change viewer's engagements with television.

This chapter identifies the book’s major themes, arguments, problems and possibilities, including reference to the major, pertinent philosophical notions of games and sport, integrating the seminal work of Bernard Suits and Brian Sutton-Smith. It outlines how a certain characterisation of the physical world arises within digital space, often through the design interface that mediates our experiences. Furthermore, it considers whether the design of perfect simulations in sports would make redundant off-line sport spaces. The chapter also discusses how examples of life online require us to reconsider what we acknowledge as real or meaningful in human experience and how this evaluation is contextualized within a set of ideological assumptions about the nature of virtual realities. It introduces the idea of second-wave convergence to explain how socio-technical changes within such practices as sports give rise to new evaluations of life online. Furthermore, it discusses how our nostalgia for analog lives is particularly apparent within practices like sports, which are constituted by a presumed notion of what embodied action and corporeality should entail. In pursuing this argument, it also considers how one defines embodiment and how wearable technology is challenging the view that digital identities are separable from our analog lives.

The theory of the Information Space was developed out of an earlier interest by Max Boisot in the theory of meanings and their relation to culture. Stimulated by deep exposure to the Chinese transition, the idea of societal evolution and the roles of meaning and culture were explored in key papers using the I-Space as framework. Comparative studies of organisations across societies were also enhanced by such analysis, as in the commentary on Dore’s work on British-Japanese factories. The need for an enhancement of the extant theory of international business was met by a more fine-grained analysis of the configurations possible under the notion of multiple provinces of meaning within a society. This provides a path out of the restricted arena of micro-economics, and allows the escape from its inevitable generalisations.

The second chapter opens with a discussion of the first “Great Transformation” and the process of industrialization itself, which has proven to be such a powerful transformative influence. The creation of industrial capitalism was achieved first in Britain in the 18th century, it ushered in an industrial revolution, which then spread through the West, creating wealth as it did so, and is now spreading worldwide, principally to China, India and Brazil. This Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944) was achieved through far-reaching changes to the economic availability of labor, energy, of natural materials and finance. These are the markets whose functioning will have to change in an eco-aware capitalism – and they are markets that are already changing in China as it accomplishes a Great Convergemce with the West. But the industrial model being used cannot scale.

This paper examines the claims made by Ledgeway (2012) concerning the existence of a North-South Continuum. After an examination of the theoretical issues in connexion with this claim, I present evidence from the Gallo-Romance area—the southern varieties of Occitan and Catalan and several northern oïl varieties, especially Wallon, Lorrain, and Norman—in an attempt to discover the motivations for the north / south distribution. I argue that the contrast represented by the be and have perfects is not only a retention of an ancient pattern, but also represents a reinvigoration of this dichotomy which occurred especially in the territory ruled by Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries, coinciding with the growth of deponent use witnessed in scribal writing. Ledgeway’s northern languages thus participate in the ‘Charlemagne Sprachbund’ (van der Auwera 1998), while the southern languages lie outside its influence. I claim that the expansion of the be / have contrast resulted from the ‘roofing’ effect of Latin upon the language of speakers and writers of the eighth and ninth centuries, and that it left its mark on the languages of the Carolingian realm, Ledgeway’s northern varieties. Many of the Gallo-Romance varieties examined here provide evidence for this multi-stage development, while several participate only partially.

Henry Jenkins, former professor of humanities, MIT, is one of the leading science authorities in the analysis of New Media. Today, he is Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at USC. In this dialogue, Jenkins explains how technology is transforming the traditional view of humanities. He outlines his vision of convergence culture in his book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He explains why he thinks the idea of copyright is an aberration. He goes on to relate the causes for conglomerates losing control of media flows and how to deal with this situation. He describes the new logic framework under which our current participatory culture is run. He defines himself in this dialogue as a critical utopian trying to demonstrate how to harness the great power that changes taking place in new media have on people. Emphasizing the ‘new social skills’, which bring about new forms of ethics, interactions, politics, types of economic activities and legal culture, in the clash between the new digital media and the old mass media.

This chapter suggests a paradigm shift in folklore and folklife studies in the twenty-first century following the "era of communication" and "professionalization of time and space" in the twentieth century. Characterized as a "hyper era" represented by keywords of convergence, practice, and frame informed by digital culture rather than the previous period's analog signification of performance, symbol, and structure, the new epoch signals a turn toward an understanding of social praxis anticipated by intellectual movements in Europe and Asia. The American contribution is theorizing of individualism and organization in everyday life.

Chapter One introduces the study’s area of investigation: the diffusion of the Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) policy model. It presents the global policy diffusion trend by introducing the findings of the study’s dataset of forty-five countries’ VC policy choices. After presenting the core empirical puzzle, the chapter introduces the study’s analytical framework –contextual rationality– which conceptualizes learning processes as both computationally strong and embedded in normative contexts, rather than as cognitively limited (as bounded rationality does) or exogenously based (as conventional forms of rationality presume). The Introduction chapter then provides rationale for studying the successful East Asian cases of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore in order to understand the broader narrative.

Chapter Seven analyzes the findings of the empirical investigations of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. The critical finding is that domestically-rooted norms are central to states’ distinct learning processes, and therefore norms are the glue that binds the domestic context with international diffusion, and rationality with constructivism. The impact of norms was found to be so strong that, counter to diffusion literature’s hypothesis about specific models leading to greater degrees of convergence, even when policymakers learned about a highly-specific VC policy item, they systematically initiated further studying and conceptualized how a different path – that better fit with their logics of appropriateness – could lead them to the same outcome. The chapter discusses why the three norms investigated – (1) interventionist orientation, (2) private sector financing and (3) local versus international firm preferences – shaped VC policy choices the way that they did in each case.

The optimal level of the capital stock occurs when the real interest rate equals the steady-state growth rate of the economy. Any factor that drives a wedge in this equality can cause prolonged economic dislocation and a misallocation of resources. The more prolonged the dislocation the greater the threat to financial stability. Economic dislocation drove misalignments in asset prices, but had particular effects on property markets in some of the peripheral countries that adopted the euro: Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece. The factor driving the wedge in these countries stemmed, firstly, from the dynamics that arose from the fact that these countries were coming from backgrounds of lower standards of living and price levels than those in the core of monetary union and, secondly, from the fact that the ECB's monetary policy bestowed low nominal interest rates on these peripheral countries. Hence real interest rates were very low relative to these countries’ high growth rates. The chapter's measure of economic dislocation can account for the financial-instability-induced output loss. There is a significant relationship between this measure and subsequent output loss both in the euro area and in a wider sample of 57 countries.

Mel Evans explores the media network surrounding House of Leaves, focusing in particular on the intersection between Danielewski’s novel and his sister Poe’s musical album Haunted, also released in 2000. Evans proposes that the album is another potential entry-point into the multilayered narrative of House of Leaves. Her fresh and original perspective illuminates both novel and album through a reading of their intertextual relationships. She concludes that the ‘effect of the intertext to foreground previously marginalised or unnoticed themes, events, or objects within the novel cannot be underestimated.’

This chapter focuses on the emergent, participatory practice of fansubbing (‘fan subtitling’), examining its origins within anime subculture and its ongoing evolution. Fansubbing is examined as an informal translation practice that emerged as a subset of media piracy with its own ethical standards and rules of conduct. Much early anime fansubbing focused on redressing the domesticating tendencies of professional services, and in this sense highlighted the gatekeeping, controlling function of translation. Hence, this case study further demonstrates links between piracy, censorship and subversion introduced in the previous chapter. It also demonstrates how fansubbing’s intervention into screen media points to the growing significance of translation as a mode of cultural participation responsive to the intensifying multilingualism of global media and technologies. Fans are discussed as ‘lead-users’ of new technologies that trial functionality and uncover emergent uses, demands and desires along the way—exemplifying the increasingly active and unruly ways in which people currently consume and engage with media. Proposing that fansubbing’s communal, errant tendencies are vital to its re-evaluative function, this chapter identifies a point of difference between the reconceptual program of this book and the notion of ‘abusive subtitling’ (Nornes 1999).

This chapter presents a case study of global TV site Viki (www.viki.com), which offers amateur subtitling in around 200 languages for media from around the world. It focuses on the ways in which fansubbing and fan repurposing of technology has been adopted in the corporate and media industries via crowdsourcing, underscoring the commerce/community tensions that characterise ‘participatory culture’. In its aim to overcome the geopolitical constraints that limit the availability of media in many parts of the globe, Viki deploys a legal, business framework that overrides the national and linguistic biases of professional subtitling and dubbing via the ‘chaos’ of fan agency and interventionist practice. It also pinpoints the critical role played by language and multilingual publics within the evolving dynamics of convergence. Finally, this case study explores claims that fansubbing and other forms of community translation may be contributing to the ongoing marginalisation of linguistically diverse publics by enabling industry players to continue to underserve minor language communities.

The chapter takes issue with a tendency for polar juxtapositions in the industrial relations literature on how internationalization affects domestic trade union practices. Instead of drawing a dichotomy between ‘convergence’ and ‘path dependence’, the chapter highlights that internationalization made these practices more similar in some respects, while it simultaneously contributed to the re-creation (rather than the mere reproduction) of diversity between and within the two countries.

This chapter presents a framework for understanding business dynamics that are not confined to industry-specific trajectories but instead reflect convergence and divergence of industries and product markets. The framework serves four purposes. Firstly, it offers a systematic way of analyzing business and innovation contexts that are not well explicated by the industry-confined frameworks associated with the Five Forces, the Product Life Cycle, and the Innovation Life Cycle models. Secondly, it proposes a theory of the generative mechanisms underlying convergence and divergence. Thirdly, it provides a new “life cycle” model, the Convergence Life Cycle. And fourthly, the framework is argued to contribute to a better understanding of the contextual dynamics underlying the Open Innovation paradigm and the related Dynamic Capabilities perspective in strategic management.