As a preface to his appeal for a public sociology, Michael Burawoy (2005: 4) quotes a passage by Walter Benjamin that pictures the “angel of history” with his face turned toward the past, where he sees a catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage. Although the angel would like to stay and make whole what has been smashed, he is caught in a violent storm that “irresistibly propels him ...

When Sequoia High School’s athletes compete this fal l , they’ll have an unusual source of inspiration at each game. dancing on the sidelines as part of the school’s cheer team will be 15-year-old angel Gonzalez-Prado, the first cheerleader in the history of the redwood city, calif., school to perform in a wheelchair. “i’ve been wanting to cheer since i was really little,” said angel. “But i di...

Preface This thesis is about combinatorial games—mostly. It is also about graphs, directed graphs and hypergraphs, to a large extent; and it deals with the complexity of certain computational problems from these two areas. We study three different problems that share several of the above aspects, yet, they form three individual subjects and so we treat them independently in three self-contained...