This book sheds new light on a selection of big data scenarios from an interdisciplinary perspective. It features legal, sociological and economic approaches to fundamental big data topics such as privacy, data quality and the ECJ's Safe Harbor decision on the one hand, and practical applications such as smart cars, wearables and web tracking ...
Machine learning techniques provide cost-effective alternatives to traditional methods for extracting underlying relationships between information and data and for predicting future events by processing existing information to train models. Efficient Learning Machines explores the major topics of machine learning, including knowledge discovery, cla...
A series of reforms have greatly improved the efficiency, reliability, and environmental performance of the Chinese power sector. However, significant challenges remain: rapidly rising electricity demand, concerns about power system reliability and energy security, environmental degradation and climate change. China's government explicitly set...
Turkey has witnessed significant social, cultural, and political change over the last decades. This transformation has manifested itself in all segments of society and resulted in the alteration of political ideologies and institutions. The twelve authors of this volume shed light on the complexities of a changing Turkey through an interdisciplinar...
This book explores the impact that professional volunteers have on the low resource countries they choose to spend time in. Whilst individual volunteering may be of immediate benefit to individual patients, this intervention may have detrimental effects on local health systems; distorting labour markets, accentuating dependencies and creating oppor...
Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribu...
This book explores how research and policymaking in the field of migrant integration have developed historically and how this interrelationship plays out in the strongly politicised climate of opinions on migration in Europe. It features interdisciplinary theoretical contributions as well as original empirical studies on research-policy dialogues a...
This book presents the roles and mechanisms of signal transduction triggered by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) stimulation in neuroprotection against toxic effects of risk factors of neurodegenerative diseases. Accumulating evidence suggests that nAChRs in the CNS play important roles not only in excitatory neurotransmission but also in...
Energy Efficient Servers: Blueprints for Data Center Optimization introduces engineers and IT professionals to the power management technologies and techniques used in energy efficient servers. The book includes a deep examination of different features used in processors, memory, interconnects, I/O devices, and other platform components. It outline...
This book presents an ethical approach to utilizing personal medical data. It features essays that combine academic argument with practical application of ethical principles. The contributors are experts in ethics and law. They address the challenges in the re-use of medical data of the deceased on a voluntary basis. This pioneering study looks at ...
This book uses Pierre Bourdieu's field theory as a lens through which to examine military operations. Novel in its approach, this innovative text provides a better, more nuanced understanding of the modern 'battlespace', particularly in instances of prolonged low-intensity conflict. Formed in two parts, this book primarily explores t...
This book utilizes new data to thoroughly analyze the main factors currently shaping the African housing market. Some of these factors include the supply and demand for housing finance, land tenure security issues, construction cost conundrum, infrastructure provision, and low-cost housing alternatives. Through detailed analysis, the authors invest...
With technology standards becoming increasingly common, particularly in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, the complexities and contradictions at the interface of intellectual property law and competition law have emerged strongly. This book talks about how the regulatory agencies and courts in the United States, European U...
This book discusses the important issue of the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of agricultural residue burning, common in agricultural practices in many parts of the world. In particular, it focuses on the pollution caused by rice residue burning using primary survey data from Punjab, India. It discusses emerging solutions to agricultural w...
The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture ...
This is the first machine-generated scientific book in chemistry published by Springer Nature. Serving as an innovative prototype defining the current status of the technology, it also provides an overview about the latest trends of lithium-ion batteries research.This book explores future ways of informing researchers and professionals. State-of-th...
The Chinese Economic Transformation, the 19th volume in the China Update book series, provides an opportunity for young economists to share their views on various issues relating to the Chinese economic transformation. More than half of the contributors to this book are female scholars. Some of the contributors are rising stars in the studies of th...
This book uses a critical sociological perspective to explore contemporary ways of reformulating the governance of crime through genetics. Through the lens of scientific knowledge and genetic technology, Machado and Granja offer a unique perspective on current trends in crime governance. They explore the place and role of genetics in criminal justi...
This book explores the interrelation between diversity in migrants' internal relations and their experience of inequality in local and global contexts. Taking the case of Hamburg-based Iranians, it traces evaluation processes in ties between professionals - artists and entrepreneurs - since the 1930s, examining migrants' potential to act ...
This book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditi...
When considering "the Internet of Things," it's easy to miss the bigger pattern: we are no longer just building software for individual devices, but creating networks of intelligence and action that make it possible to completely rethink how we organize work, play, and society itself. This report provides the complete text of Tim O&#...
You need more than great dev tools to release great software; you need an efficient pipeline that takes advantage of modern Agile development practices. Serverless platforms like AWS offer the basic building blocks you need to run code, store data, or process streaming information so you can focus on the features you want to provide, not get bogged...
Windows developers have always enjoyed the productivity boost you get with the .NET platform, tools like Entity Framework and ASP.NET, and the amazingly-powerful C# language. Now, .NET Core extends those same benefits to Linux-based systems, offering a true cross-platform solution for enterprise application development. The .NET Core tools, includi...
Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines.
Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation fo...
This book explores the key dimensions of a future education system designed to enable individuals, schools, and communities to achieve the twin twenty-first century challenges of sustainability and human well-being. For much of the twentieth century, Western education systems prepared students to enter the workforce, contribute to society and succe...
Recent reductions in public funding for audiovisual products have led to dramatic changes in the industry. The lack of interaction between the industry and capital markets has made sourcing funds for audiovisual products especially difficult.
This book explains why the distance between the audiovisual and financial markets exists, and considers th...
This free book offers a novel view on the benefits of a lasting variation between the member states in the EU. In order to bring together thirty very different European states and their citizens, the EU will have to offer more scope for variation. Unlike the existing differentiation by means of opt-outs and deviations, variation is not a concession...
Conviviality has lately become a catchword not only in academia but also among political activists. This open access book discusses conviviality in relation to the adjoining concepts cosmopolitanism and creolisation. The urgency of today's global predicament is not only an argument for the revival of all three concepts, but also a reason to br...
This book offers pioneering insights and practical methods for promoting diversity and inclusion in higher education classrooms and curricula. It highlights the growing importance of international education programs in Asia and the value of understanding student diversity in a changing, evermore interconnected world. The book explores diversity acr...
This two-volume book, published open access, brings together leading scholars of constitutional law from twenty-nine European countries to revisit the role of national constitutions at a time when decision-making has increasingly shifted to the European and transnational level. It offers important insights into three areas. First, it explores how c...
This book gives an overview of the sessions, panel discussions, and outcomes of the Advancing the Science of Cancer in Latinos conference, held in February 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, USA, and hosted by the Mays Cancer Center and the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio.Latinos – the largest, youngest, and fastest-grow...
This book is open access under a CC-BY license. This open access volume presents papers on vocational education, project-based learning and science didactic approaches, illustrating with sample cases, and with a special focus on Central Asian states. Thematically embedded in the area of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET), the book e...