We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and business actors are seeking data-driven change, assuming that Artificial Intelligence is now inevitable and ubiquitous. But we have not even started asking the right questions, let alone developed an understanding of the consequences. Urgently needed is ...
This book focuses on central themes related to the conservation of bats. It details their response to land-use change and management practices, intensified urbanization and roost disturbance and loss. Increasing interactions between humans and bats as a result of hunting, disease relationships, occupation of human dwellings, and conflict over fruit...
Sustainable development is the 21st Century's wicked problem. After 40 years into this agenda have reversed only few unsustainable trends we hear the call for aparadigm shift, transformation, radical change or system innovations in order to finally change course. But what does this actually mean? And how do we put it into practice?
This book ...
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...
Over the last few years, members of the O'Reilly community have increasingly turned their attention to hardware. It's getting much easier to design, prototype, build and market hardware, and it's getting easier to integrate software and hardware into fluid packages of intelligence, beauty, and intuitive design. Hardware and software ...
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 book summarizes the multi-disciplinary results of one of China's main primatological research projects on the endemic Tibetan macaque (Macaca thibetana), which had continued for over 30 years, but which had never been reported on systematically. Dedicated to this exceptional Old World monkey, this book makes the work of Chines...
Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing is a celebration of the diversity of ways in which humans can relate to the world around them, and an invitation to its readers to partake in planetary coexistence. Innovative, informative, and highly accessible, this interdisciplinary anthology of essays brings together scholars, writers a...
Production ergonomics - the science and practice of designing industrial workplaces to optimize human well-being and system performance - is a complex challenge for a designer. Humans are a valuable and flexible resource in any system of creation, and as long as they stay healthy, alert and motivated, they perform well and also become more competen...
This open book examines recent advances in how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have elicited widespread debate over their benefits and drawbacks for humanity. The emergent technologies have for instance implications within medicine and health care, employment, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, and armed conflict. While there has been...
Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? Making AI Intelligible shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they ill...
Network and System Administration usually refers only to the traditional skills and recipes for keeping computers and networks running properly. But, in truth, this view omits the most important part of the system: humans. The skill needed to comprehend and tame systems comprising both humans and machines is that of managing complexity. In this boo...
What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. This volume collects the work of the Onlife ...
This book explores the social history of the anti-vivisection movement in Britain from its nineteenth-century beginnings until the 1960s. It discusses the ethical principles that inspired the movement and the socio-political background that explains its rise and fall. Opposition to vivisection began when medical practitioners complained it was cont...
We are not free from environmental risks that accompany the development of human societies. Modern economic development has accelerated environmental pollution, caused loss of natural habitats, and modified landscapes. These environmental changes have impacted natural systems: water and heat circulation, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity. These ch...
Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity.
The ...
This book offers a unique and insightful analysis of Western and Middle Eastern concepts of dignity and illustrates them with examples of everyday life. Dignity in the 21st Century - Middle East and West is unique and insightful for a range of reasons. First, the book is co-authored by scholars from two different cultures (Middle East and West). As...
This survey addresses the use of technology in upper secondary mathematics education from four points of view: theoretical analysis of epistemological and cognitive aspects of activity in new technology mediated learning environments, the changes brought by technology in the interactions between environment, students and teachers, the interrelation...
This book chronicles the rise of a new scientific paradigm offering novel insights into the age-old enigmas of existence. Over 300 years ago, the human mind discovered the machine code of reality: mathematics. By utilizing abstract thought systems, humans began to decode the workings of the cosmos. From this understanding, the current scientific pa...
S-BPM stands for "subject-oriented business process management" and focuses on subjects that represent the entities (people, programs etc.) that are actively engaged in processes. S-BPM has become one of the most widely discussed approaches for process professionals. Its potential particularly lies in the integration of advanced informati...
This book shows how to use sensitivity analysis in demography. It presents new methods for individuals, cohorts, and populations, with applications to humans, other animals, and plants. The analyses are based on matrix formulations of age-classified, stage-classified, and multistate population models. Methods are presented for linear and nonlinear,...
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 breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as 'human' medicine was in fact deeply zoological.Each chapter ...
This book answers key questions about environment, people and their shared future in deltas. It develops a systematic and holistic approach for policy-orientated analysis for the future of these regions. It does so by focusing on ecosystem services in the world's largest, most populous and most iconic delta region, that of the Ganges-Brahmaput...
This timely book addresses the conflict between globalism and nationalism. It provides a liberal communitarian response to the rise of populism occurring in many democracies. The book highlights the role of communities next to that of the state and the market. It spells out the policy implications of liberal communitarianism for privacy, freedom o...
This book is the first to develop explicit methods for evaluating evidence of mechanisms in the field of medicine. It explains why it can be important to make this evidence explicit, and describes how to take such evidence into account in the evidence appraisal process. In addition, it develops procedures for seeking evidence of mechanisms, for eva...
We've all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly said that "data is the next Intel Inside." But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data? This report examines the many sides of data science - the technologi...
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&#...
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 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...
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 ...
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...