There is wide agreement on the need to change the prevalent agricultural models, given their negative impacts and their incompatibility with current societal issues. Agroecological transition has been promoted as a potential solution to the ecological, social and economic problems generated by these models. It however involves a systemic, multi-sca...
This book focuses on the global cycles of energy, water and carbon, which are not only the essentials of our main energy carriers, the fossil fuels, but are also the building blocks of life. The book offers an overview of the basic scientific facts and relationships that are needed to understand today's energy generation and use, how they rela...
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 book presents the concept of value as the central component to success and longevity of the global ICT industry player, Huawei. It provides examples of how Huawei focuses on customers to pursue sustainable and profitable growth rather than focusing on capital market valuation, which is a familiar scenario among Western companies. It is the bus...
This open book discusses the eroding economics of nuclear power for electricity generation as well as technical, legal, and political acceptance issues. The use of nuclear power for electricity generation is still a heavily disputed issue. Aside from technical risks, safety issues, and the unsolved problem of nuclear waste disposal, the economic pe...
"Hammel successfully illuminates how the production and circulation of Barber's work was deeply affected by contemporary attitudes towards gender and race within the colonial context of the nineteenth-century Cape. This fascinating book is destined to become a landmark in the history of science in South Africa."
—Nigel Penn, Unive...
This book provides a concise explanation of the fundamentals and background of the surround sound recording and playback technology Ambisonics. It equips readers with the psychoacoustical, signal processing, acoustical, and mathematical knowledge needed to understand the inner workings of modern processing utilities, special equipment for recording...
This volume focuses on microscopic plastic debris, also referred to as microplastics, which have been detected in aquatic environments around the globe and have accordingly raised serious concerns. The book explores whether microplastics represent emerging contaminants in freshwater systems, an area that remains underrepresented to date. Given th...
With technology standards becoming increasingly common, particularly in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, the complexities and contradictions at the interface of intellectual property law and competition law have emerged strongly. This book talks about how the regulatory agencies and courts in the United States, European U...
This open access proceedings of the 14th International Council for Applied Mineralogy Congress (ICAM) in Belgorod, Russia cover a wide range of topics including applied mineralogy, advanced and construction materials, ore and industrial minerals, mineral exploration, cultural heritage, etc. It includes contributions to geometallurgy, industrial min...
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 uses a critical sociological perspective to explore contemporary ways of reformulating the governance of crime through genetics. Through the lens of scientific knowledge and genetic technology, Machado and Granja offer a unique perspective on current trends in crime governance. They explore the place and role of genetics in criminal justi...
This book, published to mark the 15th anniversary of the International Software Quality Institute (iSQI), is intended to raise the profile of software testers and their profession. It gathers contributions by respected software testing experts in order to highlight the state of the art as well as future challenges and trends. In addition, it covers...
This book explores the conscious and unconscious norms, values, and characteristics that drive behaviors within the high-tech capital of the world, Silicon Valley, and the sector it represents. In an era where the reach and influence of a single industry has the potential to define the future of our world, it has become apparent just how little we ...
This book seeks to foster a multidisciplinary understanding of the ties between faith, financial intermediation, and economic progress by drawing on research across economics, finance, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, public policy, law, and other disciplines. Chapters in this edited volume examine themes as consequential as economic opportun...
This book examines the future of inequality, work and wages in the age of automation with a focus on developing countries. The authors argue that the rise of a global 'robot reserve army' has profound effects on labor markets and economic development, but, rather than causing mass unemployment, new technologies are more likely to lead to ...
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 ...
Welcome to InnerSource, the powerful movement for developing open source software within the walls of a single organization, where the "openness" of a project extends across teams inside the company. In this report, O'Reilly editor and author Andy Oram takes you inside InnerSource, first by reviewing the principles that make open sou...
You hear it a lot: DevOps is not just about tools, but also about changing company culture. But just how does an organization firmly rooted in traditional software development go about making that change? This in-depth report shows how two large organizations, Nordstrom and Texas.gov, moved from long-established software development models to the c...
You need more than great dev tools to release great software; you need an efficient pipeline that takes advantage of modern Agile development practices. Serverless platforms like AWS offer the basic building blocks you need to run code, store data, or process streaming information so you can focus on the features you want to provide, not get bogged...
If you've ever written a non-trivial JavaScript application, you know that creating a code base that's easy to maintain and scales well over time is no small feat. The complexity only grows as the project becomes larger. While it's impossible to plan for every change that could possibly happen over the life of a project, you can help...
Neo4j is the world's leading graph database and offers users a radical new way of dealing with connected data. This book has been created to help you get to grips with it, providing you with an accessible route through a tool built to contend with the complexity of modern data. Learn the fundamental concepts behind Neo4j, and put them into pra...
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...
Carried by a long-awaited wind, the chlorine cloud passed within a few minutes through the British and French trenches, leaving behind at least 1,000 dead and 4,000 injured. This chemical attack, which amounted to the first use of a weapon of mass destruction, marks a turning point in world history. The preparation as well as the execution of the g...
This book provides a fresh, updated and science-based perspective on the current status and prospects of the diverse array of topics related to the potato, and was written by distinguished scientists with hands-on global experience in research aspects related to potato. The potato is the third most important global food crop in terms of consumption...
In recent years, the European Commission has attached increasing importance to the use of financial engineering instruments rather than traditional grant-based financing for the microcredit sector, considering these to be the most efficient option available.
This book presents a study of capacity building and structural funds in public managing au...
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 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 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 book offers effective, low-cost and user-friendly protocols for the pre-field selection of salt-tolerant mutants in cereal crops. It presents simple methods for measuring soil salinity, including soil sampling and the analysis of water-soluble salts, and describes a detailed, but simple, screening test for salt tolerance in rice, wheat and bar...
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...