This book provides a unique overview of the impacts of railways on biodiversity, integrating the existing knowledge on the ecological effects of railways on wildlife, identifying major knowledge gaps and research directions and presenting the emerging field of railway ecology. The book is divided into two major parts: Part one offers a general revi...
Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribu...
This free book tells the story of how Sweden is becoming a virtually cashless society. Its goal is to improve readers' understanding of what is driving this transition, and of the factors that are fostering and hampering it. In doing so, the book covers the role of central banks, political factors, needs for innovation, and the stakeholders in...
This volume seeks to further the use of formal methods in clarifying one of the central problems of philosophy: that of our free human agency and its place in our indeterministic world. It celebrates the important contributions made in this area by Nuel Belnap, American logician and philosopher.Philosophically, indeterminism and free action can see...
The Chinese Economic Transformation, the 19th volume in the China Update book series, provides an opportunity for young economists to share their views on various issues relating to the Chinese economic transformation. More than half of the contributors to this book are female scholars. Some of the contributors are rising stars in the studies of th...
When considering "the Internet of Things," it's easy to miss the bigger pattern: we are no longer just building software for individual devices, but creating networks of intelligence and action that make it possible to completely rethink how we organize work, play, and society itself. This report provides the complete text of Tim O&#...
Consumers prefer fast, no-nonsense web experiences, yet reports show that the top 2,000 retail websites have grown increasingly bigger and slower over the past three years. In this O'Reilly report, content strategist Terrence Dorsey examines why web pages have become so fat, and offers guidelines to help your company reverse the trend.
Bigg...
The data you encounter in the real world is usually easier to think of as objects or documents than as the tables and rows required by a standard RDBMS. RavenDB, a modern document-oriented database written in .NET, requires no schema to be declared and enables developers to work with data more naturally. RavenDB applications are high-performance, l...
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...
Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines.
Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation fo...
In these powerful and stylishly written essays, Maria Manuel Lisboa dissects the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist considered one of the greatest artists of modern times. Focusing primarily on Rego's work since the 1980s, Lisboa explores the complex relationships between violence and nurturing, power and impotence, politics and th...
In a world where web services can make real-time data accessible to anyone, how can the government leverage this openness to improve its operations and increase citizen participation and awareness? Through a collection of essays and case studies, leading visionaries and practitioners both inside and outside of government share their ideas on how to...
Recent reductions in public funding for audiovisual products have led to dramatic changes in the industry. The lack of interaction between the industry and capital markets has made sourcing funds for audiovisual products especially difficult.
This book explains why the distance between the audiovisual and financial markets exists, and considers th...
This book gives an overview of the sessions, panel discussions, and outcomes of the Advancing the Science of Cancer in Latinos conference, held in February 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, USA, and hosted by the Mays Cancer Center and the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio.Latinos – the largest, youngest, and fastest-grow...
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...
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 volume presents a comprehensive account of all aspects of biological invasions in South Africa, where research has been conducted over more than three decades, and where bold initiatives have been implemented in attempts to control invasions and to reduce their ecological, economic and social effects. It covers a broad range of the...
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 ...
The world is faced with an epidemic of metabolic diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. This is due to changes in dietary habits and the decrease in physical activity. Exercise is usually part of the prescription, the first line of defense, to prevent or treat metabolic disorders. However, we are still learning how and why exercise provides ...
As the American election administration landscape changes as a result of major court cases, national and state legislation, changes in professionalism, and the evolution of equipment and security, so must the work of on-the-ground practitioners change. This Open Access title presents a series of case studies designed to highlight practical response...
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background...
This book provides an authoritative insight on the Loss and Damage discourse by highlighting state-of-the-art research and policy linked to this discourse and articulating its multiple concepts, principles and methods. Written by leading researchers and practitioners, it identifies practical and evidence-based policy options to inform the discourse...
This free book on straw management aims to provide a wide array of options for rice straw management that are potentially more sustainable, environmental, and profitable compared to current practice. The book is authored by expert researchers, engineers and innovators working on a range of straw management options with case studies from Vietnam, th...
This book investigates what international placements of healthcare employees in low resource settings add to the UK workforce and the efficacy of the its national health system. The authors present empirical data collected from a volunteer deployment project in Uganda focused on reducing maternal and new-born mortality and discuss the learning and ...
This free book explores how digital tools and social media technologies can contribute to better participation and involvement of EU citizens in European politics. By analyzing selected representative e-participation projects at the local, national and European governmental levels, it identifies the preconditions, best practices and shortcomings of...
This book deals with the relevance of recognition and validation of non-formal and informal learning in education and training, the workplace and society. In an increasing number of countries, it is at the top of the policy and research agenda ranking among the possible ways to redress the glaring lack of relevant academic and vocational qualificat...
This book presents theoretical and practical research relating to the vast, publicly financed program for the construction of new schools and the reorganization of existing educational buildings in Italy. This transformative process aims to give old buildings a fresh identity, to ensure that facilities are compliant with the new educational and tea...
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 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 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...