This book provides a set of conceptual, empirical, and comparative chapters that apply a public policy perspective to investigate the political and institutional factors driving the use of evidence to inform health policy in low, middle, and high income settings. The work presents key findings from the Getting Research Into Policy (GRIP-Health) pro...
Swiss citizens approve of their government and the way democracy is practiced; they trust the authorities and are satisfied with the range of services Swiss governments provide. This is quite unusual when compared to other countries. This book provides insight into the organization and the functioning of the Swiss state. It claims that, beyond poli...
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...
This volume seeks to further the use of formal methods in clarifying one of the central problems of philosophy: that of our free human agency and its place in our indeterministic world. It celebrates the important contributions made in this area by Nuel Belnap, American logician and philosopher.Philosophically, indeterminism and free action can see...
Unannounced and unmarked, blocks turn up all over Ruby programs. Their use ranges from some of Ruby's most basic structures, such as loops, to some of its most sophisticated tricks. Similar to closures or lambdas in other languages, blocks enable some of Ruby's vaunted efficiency. Blocks even allow other people to write some of the code y...
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&#...
If you're looking to access and make sense of all your data in real time, there's a more cost-effective and efficient way than using expensive commercial tool suites. In this O'Reilly report, Sam Newman from ThoughtWorks describes several small, freely available open source tools and frameworks for freeing data locked up in silos and...
Imagine you had to write a postmortem containing statements like these?
- We were unable to resolve the outage as quickly as we would have hoped because our decision making was impacted by extreme stress.
- We spent two hours repeatedly applying the fix that worked during the previous outage, only to find out that it made no difference in this on...
If you know how to program with Python and also know a little about probability, you're ready to tackle Bayesian statistics. With this book, you'll learn how to solve statistical problems with Python code instead of mathematical notation, and use discrete probability distributions instead of continuous mathematics. Once you get the math o...
How do we evaluate ambiguous concepts such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice? How do we develop policies that offer everyone the best chance to achieve what they want from life? The capability approach, a theoretical framework pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s, has become an increasingly influential way to ...
In these powerful and stylishly written essays, Maria Manuel Lisboa dissects the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist considered one of the greatest artists of modern times. Focusing primarily on Rego's work since the 1980s, Lisboa explores the complex relationships between violence and nurturing, power and impotence, politics and th...
Carried by a long-awaited wind, the chlorine cloud passed within a few minutes through the British and French trenches, leaving behind at least 1,000 dead and 4,000 injured. This chemical attack, which amounted to the first use of a weapon of mass destruction, marks a turning point in world history. The preparation as well as the execution of the g...
This book provides a fresh, updated and science-based perspective on the current status and prospects of the diverse array of topics related to the potato, and was written by distinguished scientists with hands-on global experience in research aspects related to potato. The potato is the third most important global food crop in terms of consumption...
This book collects 4 keynote and 15 theme lectures presented at the 2nd European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (2ECEES), held in Istanbul, Turkey, from August 24 to 29, 2014. The conference was organized by the Turkish Earthquake Foundation - Earthquake Engineering Committee and Prime Ministry, Disaster and Emergency Managemen...
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 advanced textbook and reference is the first comprehensive and systematic review of all methods used for the measurement, correction, and control of the beam dynamics of modern particle accelerators. Based on material presented in several lectures at the US Particle Accelerator School, the text is intended for graduate students starting resear...
This book establishes the foundations needed to realize the ultimate goals for artificial intelligence, such as autonomy and trustworthiness. Aimed at scientists, researchers, technologists, practitioners, and students, it brings together contributions offering the basics, the challenges and the state-of-the-art on trusted autonomous systems in a s...
This free book provides the most in-depth study of capital punishment in Scotland between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century to date. Based upon an extensive gathering and analysis of previously untapped resources, it takes the reader on a journey from the courtrooms of Scotland to the theatre of the gallows. It introduces them to seve...
This book presents a qualitative longitudinal panel-study on child and adolescent socialisation in socially disadvantaged families. The study traces how children and their parents make sense of media within the context of their everyday life over twelve years (from 2005 to 2017) and provides a unique perspective on the role of different socialisati...
This open access edited collection explores obstacles that impede, and potential pathways toward improving, the material and psychological well-being of youth in and from West Africa. Contributors range from researchers to practitioners, offering a transatlantic, transcontinental set of perspectives on the mounting evidence that, whether they resid...
This free book collects the major discussions in divorce research in Europe. It starts with an understanding of divorce trends. Why was divorce increasing so rapidly throughout the US and Europe and do we see signs of a turn? Do cohabitation breakups influence divorce trends or is there a renewed stability on the partner market?In terms of divorce...
This is the first book-length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. It contrasts third-person caregiver and first-person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media, focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: wha...
This book by Helmut Wiedemann is a well-established, classic text, providing an in-depth and comprehensive introduction to the field of high-energy particle acceleration and beam dynamics.The present 4th edition has been significantly revised, updated and expanded. The newly conceived Part I is an elementary introduction to the subject matter for u...
This open access volume presents a comprehensive account of all aspects of biological invasions in South Africa, where research has been conducted over more than three decades, and where bold initiatives have been implemented in attempts to control invasions and to reduce their ecological, economic and social effects. It covers a broad range of the...
This book explores the emotional labour of crisis reporters in an original style that combines fictional and factual narrative. Exploring how journalists make sense of their emotional experience and development in relation to their professional ideology, it illustrates how media professionals learn to think and act within crisis situations. Drawing...
The world is faced with an epidemic of metabolic diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. This is due to changes in dietary habits and the decrease in physical activity. Exercise is usually part of the prescription, the first line of defense, to prevent or treat metabolic disorders. However, we are still learning how and why exercise provides ...
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background...
This free book summarizes the latest scientific findings regarding the biological effects of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FNPP) accident in 2011.
Various cases of changes in animals and organisms have been reported since the FNPP accident. However, it is often unknown whether they are actually due to radiation, since the dose or dos...
This open access report presents findings from the five Latin American countries that participated in the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). ICCS 2016 investigated the ways in which a range of countries are preparing their young people to undertake their roles as citizens during the second decad...
Technology has made human lives incomparably better. Civilization as we know it would utterly collapse without it. However, if not properly managed, technology can and will be systematically abused and misuse and thereby become one of the biggest threats to humankind. This open access book applies proactive crisis management to the management of te...
This free book brings together discourse on children and peace from the 15th International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace, covering issues pertinent to children and peace and approaches to making their world safer, fairer and more sustainable. The book is divided into nine sections that examine traditional themes (social con...
This free book explores questions such as why and how did the first biological cells appear? And then complex organisms, brains, societies and –now– connected human societies? Physicists have good models for describing the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, but can we apply the same concepts to the evolution of aggregated matter –l...