This free book offers a synthetic reflection on the authors' fieldwork experiences in seven countries within the framework of 'Authoritarianism in a Global Age', a major comparative research project. It responds to the demand for increased attention to methodological rigor and transparency in qualitative research, and seeks to advanc...
"A landmark study showing how empirical work, through the methodology of the social sciences, can come into contact with political philosophy and disability studies so as to make a meaningful contribution to policy. Dr. Victor Santiago Pineda's work will be read for decades, as a foundation for future research on the application of the ca...
This free book belongs to the Maritime Business and Economic History strand of the Palgrave Studies in Maritime Economics book series.This volume highlights the contribution of the shipping industry to the transformations in business and society of the postwar era. Shipping was both an example and an engine of globalization and structural change. I...
This is an open access book. Lewis F Richardson (1981-1953), a physicist by training, was a pioneer in meteorology and peace research and remains a towering presence in both fields. This edited volume reviews his work and assesses its influence in the social sciences, notably his work on arms races and their consequences, mathematical models, the s...
This book examines key aspects of international cooperation to enhance nuclear safety, security, safeguards, and non-proliferation, thereby assisting in development and maintenance of the verification regime and fostering progress toward a nuclear weapon-free world. The book opens by addressing important political, institutional, and legal dimensio...
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 presents the key aspects of statistics in Wasserstein spaces, i.e. statistics in the space of probability measures when endowed with the geometry of optimal transportation. Further to reviewing state-of-the-art aspects, it also provides an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of this current topic, as well as an overvie...
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...
Sustainability imposes an unprecedented challenge on society and has become the driving force of an urgent search for innovative solutions in all branches of economy. Manufacturing plays a key role in many areas of human living, and it is both part of the problem and of the solution. This book offers an overview of the broad field of research on s...
Communication is increasingly moving beyond 'ways of seeing' to 'ways of feeling'. This Open Access book provides social design insights and implications for HCI research and design exploring digitally mediated touch communication. It offers a socially orientated map to help navigate the complex social landscape of digitally me...
This book explores the dataspace paradigm as a best-effort approach to data management within data ecosystems. It establishes the theoretical foundations and principles of real-time linked dataspaces as a data platform for intelligent systems. The book introduces a set of specialized best-effort techniques and models to enable loose administrative ...
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 introduces the human development model to define disability and map its links with health and wellbeing, based on Sen's capability approach. The author uses panel survey data with internationally comparable questions on disability for Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. It presents evidence on the prevalence of disability and its ...
This open access book introduces the theoretical frameworks and academic debates concerning sexual cultural practices and HIV/AIDS in Africa. It shows how these frameworks have been applied in a practical sense in Africa to investigate sexual cultural practices and their link with HIV/AIDS. The author provides an overview of both the field of study...
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...
Based on a study among higher-educated adult children of lower-class Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, this open access book explores processes of identification among social climbers with ethnic minority backgrounds. Using both survey data and open interviews with these 'minority climbers', the study details the context...
This book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, ...
This publication addresses the global challenges of food and water security in a rapidly changing and complex world. The essays highlight the links between bio-physical and socio-cultural processes, making connections between local and global scales, and focusing on the everyday practices of eating and drinking, essential for human survival. Writte...
This book is an outcome of the collaboration between the Soil and Water Management & Crop Nutrition Section, Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Vienna, Austria, and the International Center for Biosaline Agricultur...
This open access book explores how contemporary integration policies and practices are not just about migrants and minority groups becoming part of society but often also reflect deliberate attempts to undermine their inclusion or participation. This affects individual lives as well as social cohesion. The book highlights the variety of ways in whi...
This book presents work collected through the Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Projects (LEAP) in 2017. It addresses the repeatability, variability, and sensitivity of lateral spreading observed in twenty-four centrifuge model tests on mildly sloping liquefiable sand. The centrifuge tests were conducted at nine different centrifuge facilitie...
This open access book highlights the importance of visions of alternative futures in music teacher education in a time of increasing societal complexity due to increased diversity. There are policies at every level to counter prejudice, increase opportunities, reduce inequalities, stimulate change in educational systems, and prevent and counter pol...
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 illustrates the benefits to be gained from digitally networked communication for health, education and transitioning economies in developing nations (Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea) and developed nations. Growing powers of e-citizenship can help build sustainable futures. This small volume provides a collection of examples and ideas fr...
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...