Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ...ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay.Addiction by Designtakes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward.
Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two.
Addiction by Designis a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.
Mining played a prominent role in the shaping and settling of the American West in the nineteenth century. Following the discovery of the famous Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, mining became ...increasingly industrialized, changing mining technology, society, and culture throughout the world. In the wake of these changes Nevada became an important mining region, with new people and technologies further altering the ways mining was pursued and miners interacted. Historical archaeology offers a research strategy for understanding mining and miners that integrates three independent sources of information about the past: physical remains, documents, and oral testimony. Mining Archaeology in the American West explores mining culture and practices through the microcosm of Nevada’s mining frontier. The history of mining technology, the social and cultural history of miners and mining societies, and the landscapes and environments of mining are topics examined in this multifocus research. In this updated and expanded edition of the seminal work on mining in Nevada, Donald Hardesty brings scholarship up to the present with important new research and insights into how people, technology, culture, architecture, and landscape changed during this period of mining history.
The modern Great Basin of the interior western United States is characterized by surface winds with considerable spatial and temporal variabilities. Wind records from the second half of the 20th ...century for 12 Great Basin localities, analyzed with standard aeolian-sediment transport methods developed elsewhere in the world, reflect this complexity. The drift potential (DP) for aeolian deposits is generally moderate (DP 200–400) in the western Great Basin and weak (DP
<
200) in the central Great Basin where winds are predominantly west-southwesterly. DP is relatively high (DP
>
300) at the eastern edge of the Great Basin where the dominant prevailing wind direction is south-southwesterly. Both DP and resultant drift direction (RDD) are consistent with synoptic meteorological observations of the evolution of cold fronts in the Great Basin. Meteorological observations show that effective winds to produce dunes are most commonly the result of late winter–early spring cyclogenesis. There has been considerable temporal variability of DP in the latter half of the 20th century. Most of the Great Basin has experienced decreasing wind strength since 1973, consistent with recent studies of wind strength in North America and elsewhere. Dune morphology matches both localized RDD and temporal variations in DP reasonably well in the Great Basin. The results demonstrate that local topography can have an important influence on wind directionality, thus providing a cautionary note on the interpretation of dune morphology in the paleoclimatic and stratigraphic record.
The State of Sex Brents, Barbara; Jackson, Crystal; Hausbeck, Kathryn
2010, 20091216, 2009, 2009-12-16, 20100101
eBook
The State of Sex is a study of Nevada's brothels that situates the nation's only legal brothel industry in the political economy of contemporary tourism. Nevada is part of the "new American ...heartland," as its pastimes, people, and politics have become more central to the nation. The rise of a service and leisure economy over the past sixty years has propelled sexuality into the heart of contemporary markets. Yet, neoliberal laws in the United States promote business but limit sexual commerce.
How have Nevada's legal brothels survived, while the rest of the country criminalizes prostitution? How do brothels operate? Who works in them? This book brings social theory on globalizing economies, politics, leisure consumption, and emotional labor in interactive service work together with research on contemporary prostitution and sexual commerce. The authors employ an innovative, multi-method sociological approach, combining historical analysis of how the brothels came to be with over a decade's worth of ethnographic research on the current state of the industry.
Deposits near Lamoille in the Ruby Mountains-East Humboldt Range of central Nevada and at Woodfords on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada each record two distinct glacial advances. We compare ...independent assessments of terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (TCN) surface exposure ages for glacial deposits that we have determined to those obtained by others at the two sites. At each site, TCN ages of boulders on moraines of the younger advance are between 15 and 30ka and may be associated with marine oxygen isotope stage (MIS) 2. At Woodfords, TCN ages of boulders on the moraine of the older advance are younger than ~60ka and possibly formed during MIS 4, whereas boulders on the correlative outwash surface show ages approaching 140ka (~MIS 6). The TCN ages of boulders on older glacial moraine at Woodfords thus appear to severely underestimate the true age of the glacial advance responsible for the deposit. The same is possibly true at Lamoille where clasts sampled from the moraine of the oldest advance have ages ranging between 20 and 40ka with a single outlier age of ~80ka. The underestimations are attributed to the degradation and denudation of older moraine crests. Noting that boulder ages on the older advances at each site overlap significantly with MIS 2. We speculate that erosion of the older moraines has been episodic, with a pulse of denudation accompanying the inception of MIS 2 glaciation.
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•Major glacial advances recorded in moraines at two sites in the Basin and Range.•Ages of moraines are estimated with terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide (TCN) analysis.•Erosion complicates use of TCN analysis to date moraines from older glacial advances.•Erosion of older moraines may be increased during times of subsequent glaciation.•TCN ages determined by different laboratories and investigators show agreement.
The Sierra Nevada, California's iconic mountain range, harbors thousands of remote high-elevations lakes from which water flows to sustain agriculture and cities. As climate and air quality in the ...region change, so do the watershed processes upon which these lakes depend. In order to understand the future of California's ecology and natural resources, we need an integrated account of the environmental processes that underlie these aquatic systems. Synthesizing over three decades of research on the lakes and watersheds of the Sierra Nevada, this book develops an integrated account of the hydrological and biogeochemical systems that sustain them. With a focus on Emerald Lake in Sequoia National Park, the book marshals long-term limnological and ecological data to provide a detailed and synthetic account, while also highlighting the vulnerability of Sierra lakes to changes in climate and atmospheric deposition. In so doing, it lays the scientific foundations for predicting and understanding how the lakes and watersheds will respond.
Archaeocyath sponges, the first group of reef-building organisms, have a globally distributed albeit restricted stratigraphic occurrence. Archaeocyathan reefs are well known from the western United ...States, particularly in units like the Montenegro, Poleta, and Harkless formations of the White-Inyo ranges and Esmeralda County, Nevada. While it is recognized that these organisms disappear at some time above the last occurrence of their reefs in the Harkless Formation, the precise timing of their disappearance is unknown. Here, we show that the last archaeocyathan reefs in the upper Harkless Formation near Gold Point, Nevada, are overlain by 20–60 m of interbedded siltstone and carbonate that preserve a negative carbon isotopic excursion consistent with the AECE event (archaeocyath extinction carbon excursion). Point counts of reef thin sections and analysis of acid-insoluble residues of reef and reef-adjacent samples illustrate that these last reefs also harbor previously undescribed diversity and abundance of animals living in and among the reefs, including an array of small shelly fossil taxa. We confirm previous work that the reefs of the early Cambrian were ecologically diverse and functioned in many ways like reefs of the later Paleozoic, even just prior to their global demise in the late early Cambrian, and that the extinction of archaeocyaths is recorded in strata of the Harkless Formation.
•Quantitative analysis of archaeocyathan reefs, western US, reveals abundant animals.•Small shelly fossils are preserved within and adjacent to the reefs.•Carbon isotope excursion overlying reefs matches the AECE event.•The extinction of archaeocyaths is captured in the Harkless Formation, western US.
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