This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2016, held in Edinburgh, UK, in May 2016.While agile development has already become mainstream in industry, this field is still constantly evolving and continues to spur an enormous interest both in industry and academia. To this end, ...
Digital Video Concepts, Methods, and Metrics: Quality, Compression, Performance, and Power Trade-off Analysis is a concise reference for professionals in a wide range of applications and vocations. It focuses on giving the reader mastery over the concepts, methods and metrics of digital video coding, so that readers have sufficient understanding to...
This Open Access book combines expertise in information literacy with expertise in education and teaching to share tips and tricks for the development of good information literacy teaching and training in universities and libraries. It draws on research, knowledge and pedagogical practice from academia, to teach students how to sift through informa...
This book investigates the effects of changes in leadership and managerial structures of Nordic universities resulting from reforms in the last decade. It builds on a rich, comparative dataset across a multiplicity of system-wide (macro) and organisational (meso and micro) dimensions, namely: reform or policy initiatives; drivers, aims, instruments...
This open book focuses on investigating predicting precursor information and key points of rockburst in mining engineering through laboratory experiment, theoretical analysis, numerical simulation and case studies. Understanding the evolution patterns for the microstructure instability of rock is a prerequisite for rockburst prediction. The book pr...
This book examines more than two centuries of societal development using novel historical and statistical approaches. It applies the well-being monitor developed by Statistics Netherlands that has been endorsed by a significant part of the international, statistical community. It features The Netherlands as a case study, which is an especially inte...
This book shows how the study of multi-hadron production phenomena in the years after the founding of CERN culminated in Hagedorn's pioneering idea of limiting temperature, leading on to the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma -- announced, in February 2000 at CERN.Following the foreword by Herwig Schopper -- the Director General (1981-1988) o...
The proceedings of the international conference "SMSEC2014", a joint conference of the first "Social Modeling and Simulations" and the 10th "Econophysics Colloquium", held in Kobe in November 2014 with 174 participants, are gathered herein. Cutting edge scientific researches on various social phenomena are reviewed. Ne...
This open access report explores the nature and extent of students' misconceptions and misunderstandings related to core concepts in physics and mathematics and physics across grades four, eight and 12. Twenty years of data from the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and TIMSS Advanced assessments are anal...
This book analyses intellectual property and innovation governance in the development of six key industries in India and China. These industries are reflective of the innovation and economic development of the two economies, or of vital importance to them: the IT Industry, the film industry, the pharmaceutical industry, plant varieties and food sec...
This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, b...
This free book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multiple-Aspect Analysis of Semantic Trajectories, MASTER 2019, held in conjunction with the 19th European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2019, in Würzburg, Germany, in September 2019. The 8 ful...
This book is a practical introduction to multilevel modelling or multilevel analysis (MLA) – a statistical technique being increasingly used in public health and health services research. The authors begin with a compelling argument for the importance of researchers in these fields having an understanding of MLA to be able to judge not only the g...
This open access book – as the title suggests – explores some of the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of perspectivism. Perspectivism has recently emerged in philosophy of science as an interesting new position in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. But there is a lot more to perspectivism than discussions ...
This Open Access textbook provides students and researchers in the life sciences with essential practical information on how to quantitatively analyze data images. It refrains from focusing on theory, and instead uses practical examples and step-by step protocols to familiarize readers with the most commonly used image processing and analysis platf...
This book introduces readers to the regional geology of Hanggai, Xianxia and Chuancun, the area between China's northern Zhejiang Province and southern Anhui Province and explores the strata, magmatic rocks and tectonic structures in 1:50,000 scale geological maps. Based on studies of multiple stratigraphic divisions, the standard stratigraphi...
This open access book, inspired by the ICME 13 Thematic Afternoon on "European Didactic Traditions", consists of 17 chapters, in which educators from the Netherlands reflect on the teaching and learning of mathematics in their country and the role of the Dutch domain-specific instruction theory of Realistic Mathematics Education.Written b...
This free book examines the triangle between family, gender, and health in Europe from a demographic perspective. It helps to understand patterns and trends in each of the three components separately, as well as their interdependencies. It overcomes the widely observable specialization in demographic research, which usually involves researchers stu...
This free book presents an overview and step-by-step explanation of process management. It starts with the individual participants' perspectives on their work in a process and its structuring and harmonization, and then moves on to its specification in a model and how it is embedded in the organizational and IT environment of the company. Last...
This book summarizes the key findings from the second cycle of IEA's International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), conducted in 2018. ICILS seeks to establish how well schools around the globe are responding to the need to provide young people with the necessary digital participatory competencies. Effective use of information ...
This open access book provides an alternative theoretical framework of irregular migration that allows to overcome many of the contradictions and theoretical impasses displayed by the majority of approaches in current literature. The analytical framework allows moving from an interpretation biased by methodological nationalism, to a more general sy...
This book provides a panoramic view of the evolution of Spanish agriculture from 1900 to the present, offering a more diverse picture to the complex and multidimensional reality of agrarian production. With a clear transdisciplinary ambition, the book applies an original and innovative theoretical and methodological tool, termed Agrarian Social Met...
This open access textbook welcomes students into the fundamental theory of measure, integration, and real analysis. Focusing on an accessible approach, Axler lays the foundations for further study by promoting a deep understanding of key results. Content is carefully curated to suit a single course, or two-semester sequence of courses, creating a v...
This free book provides up-to-date information on best practice to improve experimental design and quality of research in non-clinical pharmacology and biomedicine....
If you're a student studying computer science or a software developer preparing for technical interviews, this practical book will help you learn and review some of the most important ideas in software engineering - data structures and algorithms - in a way that's clearer, more concise, and more engaging than other materials.
By emphas...
There could be no more opportune time than the start of the third millennium AD to produce an entirely new atlas of world history. Not only does this symbolic (if arbitrary) moment provoke a mood of public retrospection, but the pace of global change itself demands a greater awareness of "whole world" history.
More than 20 years have p...
In a world where new technologies are being developed at a dizzying pace, how can we best approach oral genres that represent heritage? Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores the idea of sharing as a model to construct and disseminate the knowledge of literary heritage with the people who are represented by and in...
The human population's annual total consumption is not sustainable by one planet. This unprecedented situation calls for a reform of religious cultures that promote a large ideal family size. Many observers assume that Christianity is inevitably part of this problem because it promotes "family values" and statistically, in America an...
The notion of a superior 'Germanic' or 'Nordic' race was a central theme in Nazi ideology. But it was also a commonly accepted idea in the early twentieth century, an actual scientific concept originating from anthropological research on the physical characteristics of Europeans. The Scandinavian Peninsula was considered to be t...
Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions.
Why, then, aren't all DBAs using them? Why do many DBAs continue to ignore them in favour of &quo...
This bestselling book is now the standard guide to building phone systems with Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that has traditional telephony providers running scared! Revised for the 1.4 release of the software, the new edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony reveals how you can save money on equipment and support, and finally be in control ...
The next frontier for wireless LANs is 802.11ac, a standard that increases throughput beyond one gigabit per second. This concise guide provides in-depth information to help you plan for 802.11ac, with technical details on design, network operations, deployment, and monitoring.
Author Matthew Gast - an industry expert who led the development of ...