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. ...
The open access book discusses human health and wellbeing within the context of built environments. It provides a comprehensive overview of relevant sources of literature and user complaints that clearly demonstrate the consequences of lack of attention to health in current building design and planning. Current designing of energy-efficient buildin...
This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and 'new imperial history' paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan 'intercultur...
"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 provides a systematic overview of experiences with Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) and undergraduate research (UR) in German universities, covering both research universities (Universitäten) and universities of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen). Divided into three parts, the book starts with the principles and common practices of IBL/UR at...
This book looks at how a democracy can devolve into a post-factual state.The media is being flooded by populist narratives, fake news, conspiracy theories and make-believe. Misinformation is turning into a challenge for all of us, whether politicians, journalists, or citizens. In the age of information, attention is a prime asset and may be convert...
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 book discusses booming housing markets in cities around the globe, and the resulting challenges for policymakers and central banks. Cities are booming everywhere, leading to a growing demand for urban housing. In many cities this demand is out-pacing supply, which causes house prices to soar and increases the pressure on rental markets. These ...
This book highlights Singapore's development into a city in which water and greenery, along with associated environmental, technical, social and political aspects have been harnessed and cultivated into a liveable sustainable way of life. It is also a story about a unique and thoroughgoing approach to large-scale and potentially transferable w...
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 explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodie...
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...
This open access volume provides evidence-based knowledge on European solidarity and citizen responses in times of crisis. Does the crisis of European integration translate into a crisis of European solidarity, and if yes, what are the manifestations at the level of individual citizens? How strongly is solidarity rooted at the individual level, bot...
This book deals with imaging of the abdomen and pelvis, an area that has seen considerable advances over the past several years, driven by clinical as well as technological developments. The respective chapters, written by internationally respected experts in their fields, focus on imaging diagnosis and interventional therapies in abdominal and pel...
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 is a result of the first ever study of the transformations of the higher education institutional landscape in fifteen former USSR countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It explores how the single Soviet model that developed across the vast and diverse territory of the Soviet Union over several decades has evolved int...
This Brief presents new approaches and innovative challenges to address bringing technology into community-oriented policing efforts. "Community-oriented policing" is an approach that encourages police to develop and maintain personal relationships with citizens and community organizations. By developing these partnerships, the goal is to...
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...
In everyday communication, Europe's citizens, business partners and politicians are inevitably confronted with language barriers. Language technology has the potential to overcome these barriers and to provide innovative interfaces to technologies and knowledge. This document presents a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020. T...
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...
In the light of growing political and religious fundamentalism, this book defends the idea of freedom as paramount for the attempt to find common ethical ground in the age of globality. The book sets out to examine as yet unexhausted ways to boost the resilience of the principle of liberalism. Critically reviewing the last 200 years of the philosop...
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. ...
This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the 'truth' of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the cli...
and reports on research carried out as part of the European Union co-funded C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project which targeted hate speech and hate crime across a number of EU member states. It showcases the bearing that discourse analytic research can have on our understanding of this phenomenon that is a growing global cause for concern. Although 'ha...
This book presents an Empirical Model of Global Climate developed by the authors and uses that model to show that global warming will likely remain below 2ºC, relative to preindustrial, throughout this century provided: a) both the unconditional and conditional Paris INDC commitments are followed; b) the emission reductions needed to achieve the P...