Blowup, says Armando Prats, is one of the necessary movies. It is a "living expression of the transition into the new narrative domains" in terms of man's "new vision of himself as a narrative creature in a world whose very essense is cinematic narration." Prats' work on the new humanism inherent in postwar filmmaking is a rewarding work with implications for the fields of esthetics and axiology as well as film criticism. In his analyses of four films by three directors—Fellini's Director's Notebook and The Clowns, Wertmiller's Seven Beauties, Antonioni's Blowup—Prats shows the contrasts between the conventional, word-bound narrative methods of the past and the new narrative in which images are free to display their energies fully, to lead the eye beyond rational concepts of reality and illusion, truth and falsity, good an evil, beauty and ugliness. The autonomous visual event, Prats finds, offers one of the most direct ways of entering into adventures of ideas, particularly in the realm of human values. Movies have revolutionized art as well as thought about art, and inasmuch as art and life converge, they have revolutionized life itself.

This classic research monograph develops and illustrates the theory of linguistic structure known as Cognitive Grammar, and applies it to representative phenomena in English and other languages. Cognitive grammar views language as an integral facet of cognition and claims that grammatical structure cannot be understood or revealingly described independently of semantic considerations. It argues that grammar forms a continuum with the lexicon and is reducible to symbolic relationships (i.e. form-meaning pairings), and consequently that all valid grammatical constructs have some kind of conceptual import. The coherence and descriptive potential of cognitive grammar are exemplified by application to a broad variety of grammatical phenomena drawn from numerous languages.

Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their use of digital tools and their insistence on the importance of producing knowledge about their practices through strategies of self-representation and grassroots theorization. The Book in Movement explores the reinvention of a specific form of media: the print book. Magalí Rabasa travels through the political and literary underground of cities in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile to explore the ways that autonomous politics are enacted in the production and circulation of books.

In Digital Image Systems, Claus Gunti examines the antagonizing reactions to digital technologies in photography. While Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Jörg Sasse have gradually adopted digital imaging tools in the early 1990s, other photographers from the Düsseldorf School have remained faithful to film-based technologies. By evaluating the aesthetic and discursive preconditions of this situation and by extensively analyzing the digital work of these three photographers, this book shows that the digital turn in photography was anticipated by the conceptualization of images within systems, and thus offers new perspectives for understanding the »digital revolution«.

Ideas of 'nursing' and 'nurses' carry a powerful social charge. The image of the nurse continues to be a symbol of caring and of duty at the same time as it projects a view of femininity, 'stereotypical' in its gender relations. How has this image come to be constructed? An empirical investigation of representations of nursing practices in Britain focusing on publicity and promotional materials and their relationship to popular fictional narratives reveals a strong correlation between what are usually described as discrete forms of signification. Recruitment images, provide an important source of information and inspiration for those considering nurse training. Julia Hallam, draws from a wide range of sources including biographies, marketing and recruitment literature, popular fiction and film to explore this question. In doing so she makes an original contribution to the debates surrounding gender and occupational identity. The book will provide a valuable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses such as the social history of nursing, the understanding of health and illness, women's studies, gender studies and sociology courses.

An autonomous agent is a computational system that acquires sensory data from its environment and decides by itself how to relate the external stimulus to its behaviors in order to attain certain goals. Responding to different stimuli received from its task environment, the agent may select and exhibit different behavioral patterns. The behavioral patterns may be carefully predefined or dynamically acquired by the agent based on some learning and adaptation mechanism(s). In order to achieve structural flexibility, reliability through redundancy, adaptability, and reconfigurability in real-world tasks, some researchers have started to address the issue of multiagent cooperation. Broadly speaking, the power of autonomous agents lies in their ability to deal with unpredictable, dynamically changing environments. Agent-based systems are becoming one of the most important computer technologies, holding out many promises for solving real-world problems.The aims of this book are to provide a guided tour to the pioneering work and the major technical issues in agent research, and to give an in-depth discussion on the computational mechanisms for behavioral engineering in autonomous agents. Through a systematic examination, the book attempts to provide the general design principles for building autonomous agents and the analytical tools for modeling the emerged behavioral properties of a multiagent system.