This book offers an analytical presentation of how Europe has created its own version of collective actions. In the last three decades, Europe has seen a remarkable proliferation of collective action legislation, making class actions the most successful export product of the American legal scholarship. While its spread has been surrounded by distru...
This book provides methods for the estimation of Biomass Water Equivalent (BEW), an essential step for improving the accuracy of area-wide soil moisture by cosmic-ray neutron sensors (CRNS). Three techniques are explained in detail: (i) traditional in-situ destructive sampling, (ii) satellite based remote sensing of plant surfaces, and (iii) biom...
This book brings out the state of the art on how informatics-based tools are used and expected to be used in nanomaterials research. There has been great progress in the area in which "big-data" generated by experiments or computations are fully utilized to accelerate discovery of new materials, key factors, and design rules. Data-intensi...
This book discusses a variety of important but unprecedented ways in which psychology can be useful to philosophy. The early chapters illustrate this theme via comparisons between Chinese and Western philosophy. It is argued that the Chinese notion of a heart-mind is superior to the Western concept of mind, but then, more even-handedly, the relativ...
By examining the implementation dynamics of EU Readmission Agreements (EURAs), this book addresses the practical reasons why irregular immigrants cannot be expelled. EURAs are one of the vital legal instruments framing EU external migration law with regard to the expulsion of irregular immigrants, yet their implementation has met with various obsta...
This book presents computer programming as a key method for solving mathematical problems. There are two versions of the book, one for MATLAB and one for Python. The book was inspired by the Springer book TCSE 6: A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python (by Langtangen), but the style is more accessible and concise, in keeping with the needs o...
This book presents the deterministic view of quantum mechanics developed by Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft.Dissatisfied with the uncomfortable gaps in the way conventional quantum mechanics meshes with the classical world, 't Hooft has revived the old hidden variable ideas, but now in a much more systematic way than usual. In this, quantu...
This book reports on the results of an extended survey conducted across Europe within the framework of the APPRAISAL FP7 project to determine the extent to which an integrated assessment approach to air quality is being adopted, on the one hand, by regional and local authorities to develop air quality plans and, on the other, by researchers. Follow...
'This book… brings together high quality research, real world pragmatism and an understanding of the politics of Indian food systems.' – Lawrence Haddad, Executive Director, GAIN and 2018 World Food Prize Laureate'[The authors] have done a masterful job of [demonstrating] paradoxes of India's rapid economic growth concurrent...
This book presents the results from the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). Using data from 24 countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, the study investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 2...
This book is an open access publication.Forest ecosystems in Central Europe are changing as a result of anthropogenic influences and changing climate conditions. As such, a large-scale monitoring programme was undertaken in order to understand the influence of site modification, deposition of air pollutants, and climate.
This book presents the sci...
This open access volume is about how to research the influence of our changing media environment. Today, there is not one single medium that is the driving force of change. With the spreading of various technical communication media such as mobile phone and internet platforms, we are confronted with a media manifold of deep mediatization. But how c...
This book provides insight on current patterns of migration in Switzerland, which fall along a continuum from long-term and permanent to more temporary and fluid. These patterns are shaped by the interplay of legal norms, economic drivers and societal factors. The various dimensions of this Migration-Mobility Nexus are investigated by means of new...
This book addresses the issue of diffusing sustainable energy access inlow- and middle-income contexts.
Access to energy is one of the greatest challenges for many people living in low-income and developing contexts, as around 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity.Distributed Renewable Energy systems (DRE) are considered a promising approa...
This book examines health trajectories and health transitions at different stages of the life course, including childhood, adulthood and later life. It provides findings that assess the role of biological and social transitions on health status over time.The essays examine a wide range of health issues, including the consequences of military servic...
This book surveys the frontier of scientific river research and provides examples to guide management towards a sustainable future of riverine ecosystems. Principal structures and functions of the biogeosphere of rivers are explained; key threats are identified, and effective solutions for restoration and mitigation are provided. Rivers are among ...
This book contains the proceedings of the International Symposium on the Mechanisms of Sexual Reproduction in Animals and Plants, where many plant and animal reproductive biologists gathered to discuss their recent progress in investigating the shared mechanisms and factors involved in sexual reproduction. This now is the first book that reviews re...
This book bridges the gap between playing with robots in school and studying robotics at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels to prepare for careers in industry and research. Robotic algorithms are presented formally, but using only mathematics known by high-school and first-year college students, such as calculus, matrices and probability. ...
"In this book, Wallace elegantly shows how committed government intervention can improve wellbeing with rigour and impact. It's an essential read for anyone concerned with the future of the UK."Julia Unwin, CBE"As someone who commissioned one of the first attempts to learn from the devolved nations I am delighted to see this pub...
This book presents the results of the Interdisciplinary Research Group "Society – Water – Technology" of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It describes interdisciplinary evaluation criteria for major water engineering projects (MWEPs) and portrays an application to the Lower Jordan Valley (Middle East) and th...
This open access textbook is the first to provide Business and Economics Ph.D. students with a precise and intuitive introduction to the formal backgrounds of modern financial theory. It explains Brownian motion, random processes, measures, and Lebesgue integrals intuitively, but without sacrificing the necessary mathematical formalism, making them...
This book contains a collection of rare geologic maps and figures made by Chinese geologists in the last century. Preserved in National Geological Archives of China, these artworks demonstrate the development and innovation of geological mapping technology in China in the past 100 years. The collections are highly scientific and artistic, with most...
This book discusses both the theory and practical applications of self-correcting data, commonly known as error-correcting codes. The applications included demonstrate the importance of these codes in a wide range of everyday technologies, from smartphones to secure communications and transactions. Written in a readily understandable style, the boo...
This book describes the extensive contributions made toward the advancement of human assessment by scientists from one of the world's leading research institutions, Educational Testing Service. The book's four major sections detail research and development in measurement and statistics, education policy analysis and evaluation, scienti...
This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introductio...
Innovations in molecular biology are allowing neuroscientists to study the brain with unprecedented resolution, from the level of single molecules to integrated gene circuits. Chief among these innovations is the CRISPR-Cas genome editing technology, which has the precision and scalability to tackle the complexity of the brain. This Colloque Médec...
This book describes the results of natural language processing and machine learning methods applied to clinical text from electronic patient records.It is divided into twelve chapters. Chapters 1-4 discuss the history and background of the original paper-based patient records, their purpose, and how they are written and structured. These initial ch...
This text provides a very simple, initial introduction to the complete scientific computing pipeline: models, discretization, algorithms, programming, verification, and visualization. The pedagogical strategy is to use one case study – an ordinary differential equation describing exponential decay processes – to illustrate fundamental concepts ...
This collection of essays examines how spatial mobilities of people and practices, technologies and objects, knowledge and ideas have shaped the production, circulation, and transfer of knowledge in different historical and geographical contexts. Targeting an interdisciplinary audience, Mobilities of Knowledge combines detailed empirical analyses w...
The average person can name more bird species than they think, but do we really know what a bird "species" is? This book takes up several fascinating aspects of bird life to elucidate this basic concept in biology. From genetic and physiological basics to the phenomena of bird song and bird migration, it analyzes various interactions of b...
This open access, interdisciplinary book presents innovative strategies in the use of civil drones in the cultural and creative industry. Specially aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the book offers valuable insights from the fields of marketing, engineering, arts and management. With contributions from experts representing varied ...
This book introduces new methods for measuring and analyzing residential segregation. It begins by placing all popular segregation indices in the "difference of group means" framework wherein index scores can be obtained as simple differences of group means on individual-level residential attainments scored from area racial composition. ...