Many developing countries have a history of highly centralized governments. Since the late 1980s, a large number of these governments have introduced... decentralization to increase democracy and improve services, especially in small communities far from capital cities. In Going Local, an unprecedented study of the effects of decentralization on thirty Mexican municipalities, Merilee Grindle describes how local governments respond when they are assigned new responsibilities and resources under decentralization policies. She explains why decentralization leads to better local governments in some cases--and why it fails to in others. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, Grindle examines data based on a random sample of Mexican municipalities--and ventures into town halls to follow public officials as they seek to manage a variety of tasks amid conflicting pressures and new expectations. Decentralization, she discovers, is a double-edged sword. While it allows public leaders to make significant reforms quickly, institutional weaknesses undermine the durability of change, and legacies of the past continue to affect how public problems are addressed. Citizens participate, but they are more successful at extracting resources from government than in holding local officials and agencies accountable for their actions. The benefits of decentralization regularly predicted by economists, political scientists, and management specialists are not inevitable, she argues. Rather, they are strongly influenced by the quality of local leadership and politics.

With video game sales in the billions and strong opinions about their potential and their peril growing louder, Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us... In and Hold Us Spellbound brings something new to the discussion. It is the first truly balanced review of the psychology of video game motivation and engagement, based on years of research with thousands of gamers. The book addresses both the positive and negative aspects of game play by drawing on significant recent studies and established motivational theory to explore the fundamental drivers of engagement, how games satisfy basic psychological needs, and how an understanding of these factors can be applied to controversial topics such as video game violence and game addiction. Filled with examples from popular games and the real experiences of gamers themselves, Glued to Games gets to the heart of gaming's powerful psychological and emotional allure--the benefits as well as the dangers. It gives everyone from researchers to parents to gamers themselves a clearer understanding of the psychology of gaming, while offering prescriptions for healthier, more enjoyable games and gaming experiences.

How did Dallas pave the way for the Reagan era?Would Oswald have been assassinated if the cameras weren't rolling?Who really loved Lucy more--Ricky or... Ethel?...and what does that say about relationships?You may think you know television--but when NPR commentator Steven Stark is finished pushing your buttons with fighting words and brilliant insights, you'll see in a whole new way what television has done to us as a nation.  From Beaver to Roseanne, Ed Sullivan to Oprah, Monday Night Football to MTV, Stark takes us on a guided tour of the tube, providing startling revelations about the power of its sixty most important shows and events in the history of television.  He catches in bright focus a hilarious, strange, and compelling image of ourselves as reflected on the small screen, and he shows us, with striking logic, the awesome power of television over our future and our fate.Discover:The most revealing and significant leading man on TV...Bob NewhartBill Cosby as racial trailblazer...and failureWhy The Beverly Hillbillies was the watershed program that kicked off the ongoing values debate--and the rise of the Christian CoalitionHow Wheel of Fortune helped bring down communism and end the Cold War

In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between... sin and virtue, overeating and self-control--a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony. In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius's Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness--it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K. Fisher's idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size. "The broad, shiny face of the glutton," Prose writes, "has been--and continues to be--the mirror in which we see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our darkest dreams and deepest desires." Never have we delved more deeply into this mirror than in this insightful and stimulating book.

In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between... sin and virtue, overeating and self-control--a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony. In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius's Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness--it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K. Fisher's idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size. "The broad, shiny face of the glutton," Prose writes, "has been--and continues to be--the mirror in which we see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our darkest dreams and deepest desires." Never have we delved more deeply into this mirror than in this insightful and stimulating book.

The last two years have seen significant developments in the standardization of GMPLS and its implementation in optical and other networks. GMPLS:... Architecture and Applications brings you completely up to date, providing the practical information you need to put the growing set of GMPLS-supported services to work and manage them effectively.This book begins by defining GMPLS's place in a transport network, leveraging your knowledge of MPLS to give you an understanding of this radically new control plane technology. An overview of GMPLS protocols follows, but the real focus is on what comes afterwards: in-depth examinations of the architectures underpinning GMPLS in real-world network environments and current and emerging GMPLS applications. This one-of-a-kind resource delivers immensely useful information for software architects, designers and programmers, hardware developers, system testers, and network operators--and also for managers and other decision-makers. + Written by two industry researchers at the forefront of the development of GMPLS.+ Provides a practical look at GMPLS protocols for signaling, routing, link and resource management, and traffic engineering.+ Delves deep into the world of GMPLS applications, including traffic engineering, path computation, layer one VPNs, point-to-multipoint connectivity, service management, and resource protection.+ Explores three distinct GMPLS control plane architectures: peer, overlay, and hybrid, and explains the GMPLS UNI and NNIs.+ Explains how provisioning challenges can be met in multi-region networks and details the provisioning systems and tools relied on by the GMPLS control plane, along with the standard MIB modules used to manage a GMPLS system.