This book discusses the important issue of the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of agricultural residue burning, common in agricultural practices in many parts of the world. In particular, it focuses on the pollution caused by rice residue burning using primary survey data from Punjab, India. It discusses emerging solutions to agricultural w...
This book offers new insights into the ageing-migration nexus and the nature of home. Documenting the hidden world of France's migrant worker hostels, it explores why older North and West African men continue to live past retirement age in this sub-standard housing. Conventional wisdom holds that at retirement labour migrants ought to instead ...
The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture ...
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...
If you want to learn how to program, working with Python is an excellent way to start. This hands-on guide takes you through the language a step at a time, beginning with basic programming concepts before moving on to functions, recursion, data structures, and object-oriented design. This second edition and its supporting code have been updated for...
Think Java is a hands-on introduction to computer science and programming used by many universities and high schools around the world. Its conciseness, emphasis on vocabulary, and informal tone make it particularly appealing for readers with little or no experience. The book starts with the most basic programming concepts and gradually works its wa...
The title of this book was originally Think Perl 6, but since Perl 6 has been renamed Raku, we have also changed the title of the book.
Want to learn how to program and think like a computer scientist? This practical guide gets you started on your programming journey with the help of Raku (Perl 6), the younger sister of the popular Perl programm...
How does technology impact research practices in the humanities? How does digitisation shape scholarly identity? How do we negotiate trust in the digital realm? What is scholarship, what forms can it take, and how does it acquire authority?
This diverse set of essays demonstrate the importance of asking such questions, bringing together establis...
This free book offers a novel view on the benefits of a lasting variation between the member states in the EU. In order to bring together thirty very different European states and their citizens, the EU will have to offer more scope for variation. Unlike the existing differentiation by means of opt-outs and deviations, variation is not a concession...
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 is open access under a CC-BY license. This open access volume presents papers on vocational education, project-based learning and science didactic approaches, illustrating with sample cases, and with a special focus on Central Asian states. Thematically embedded in the area of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET), the book e...
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 book offers both conceptual and empirical descriptions of how to "frame" sustainability challenges. It defines "framing" in the context of sustainability science as the process of identifying subjects, setting boundaries, and defining problems. The chapters are grouped into two sections: a conceptual section and a case sect...
This book has brought together leading investigators who work in the new arena of brain connectomics. This includes 'macro-connectome' efforts to comprehensively chart long-distance pathways and functional networks; 'micro-connectome' efforts to identify every neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, and glial process within restricted ...
This free book analyses the interplay of sustainable development and human rights from different perspectives including fight against poverty, health, gender equality, working conditions, climate change and the role of private actors. Each aspect is addressed from a more human rights-focused angle and a development-policy angle. This allows compari...
This free book focuses on family diversity from a legal, demographical and sociological perspective. It investigates what is at stake in the life of homosexuals in the field of family formation, parenting and parenthood, what it brings to everyday life, the support of the law, and what its absence implies. The book shows the paths leading to the ad...
This free book focuses on the interplay between random walks on planar maps and Koebe's circle packing theorem. Further topics covered include electric networks, the He–Schramm theorem on infinite circle packings, uniform spanning trees of planar maps, local limits of finite planar maps and the almost sure recurrence of simple random walks o...
This free book summarizes research being pursued within the Manutelligence project, the goal of which is to help enterprises develop smart, social and flexible products with high value added services. Manutelligence has improved Product and Service Design by developing suitable models and methods, and connecting them through a modular, collaborativ...
This open access textbook takes the reader step-by-step through the concepts of mechanics in a clear and detailed manner. Mechanics is considered to be the core of physics, where a deep understanding of the concepts is essential in understanding all branches of physics. Many proofs and examples are included to help the reader grasp the fundamentals...
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 free book revisits the theoretical foundations of urban planning and the application of these concepts and methods in the context of Southern countries by examining several case studies from different regions of the world. For instance, the case of Koudougou, a medium-sized city in one of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso, with ...
This open access volume presents state-of-the-art inference methods in population genomics, focusing on data analysis based on rigorous statistical techniques. After introducing general concepts related to the biology of genomes and their evolution, the book covers state-of-the-art methods for the analysis of genomes in populations, including demog...
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 free book describes the history, structure and institutions of open and distance education in six countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. It discusses how open and distance education is evolving in a digital age to reflect the needs and circumstances of national higher education systems in these countries, and explore...
Tensor network is a fundamental mathematical tool with a huge range of applications in physics, such as condensed matter physics, statistic physics, high energy physics, and quantum information sciences. This open access book aims to explain the tensor network contraction approaches in a systematic way, from the basic definitions to the important a...
This free book discusses the relationship between periodicals, tourism, and nation-building in Mexico. It enquires into how magazines, a staple form of the promotional apparatus of tourism since its inception, articulated an imaginative geography of Mexico at a time when that industry became a critical means of economic recovery and political stabi...
This open access handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of biometrics exploiting the shape of human blood vessels for biometric recognition, i.e. vascular biometrics, including finger vein recognition, hand/palm vein recognition, retina recognition, and sclera recognition. After an introductory chapter summarizing the state of the art i...
This book presents an overview of the main research findings and case studies concerning education and skills for inclusive growth, green jobs and the greening of economies. Focusing on India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Viet Nam, it discusses government and business sector responses to these issues and how Technical and Vocational Education and Train...
This open access book offers a timely guide to challenges and current practices to permanently plug and abandon hydrocarbon wells. With a focus on offshore North Sea, it analyzes the process of plug and abandonment of hydrocarbon wells through the establishment of permanent well barriers. It provides the reader with extensive knowledge on the type ...
This book is the product of a collaborative effort involving partners from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America who were funded by the International Development Research Centre Programme on Women and Migration (2006-2011). The International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam spearheaded a project intended to distill and r...
This free book discusses firm valuation, which is of interest to economists, particularly those working in finance. Firm valuation comes down to the calculation of the discounted cash flow, often only referred to by its abbreviation, DCF. There are, however, different coexistent versions, which seem to compete against each other, such as entity app...