This book is the first to develop explicit methods for evaluating evidence of mechanisms in the field of medicine. It explains why it can be important to make this evidence explicit, and describes how to take such evidence into account in the evidence appraisal process. In addition, it develops procedures for seeking evidence of mechanisms, for eva...
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 ...
You're sitting on a pile of interesting data. How do you transform that into money? It's easy to focus on the contents of the data itself, and to succumb to the (rather unimaginative) idea of simply collecting and reselling it in raw form. While that's certainly profitable right now, you'd do well to explore other opportunities ...
We've all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly said that "data is the next Intel Inside." But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data? This report examines the many sides of data science - the technologi...
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...
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...
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 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...
In this volume, international researchers of the field describe and discuss the systematic review method in its application to research in education. Alongside fundamental methodical considerations, reflections and practice examples are included and provide an introduction and overview on systematic reviews in education research.
Reflections on th...
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 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 volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Trends in Mathematics a...
This open access book shares impact stories – testimonies from various value chain actors who have been part of the Tropical Legumes (TL) projects, over the past twelve years. The Tropical Legumes projects led by ICRISAT in three parts (TLI, TLII and TLIII), constitute a major international initiative supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Semantic Systems, SEMANTiCS 2019, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in September 2019.The 20 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. They cover topics such as: web semantics and linked (open) dat...
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 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...
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 open access book summarizes the multi-disciplinary results of one of China's main primatological research projects on the endemic Tibetan macaque (Macaca thibetana), which had continued for over 30 years, but which had never been reported on systematically. Dedicated to this exceptional Old World monkey, this book makes the work of Chines...
This open access book explores the histories and geographies of fishing in North Korea and the surrounding nations. With the ideological and environmental history of North Korea in mind, the book examines the complex interactions between local communities, fish themselves, wider ecosystems and the politics of Pyongyang through the lens of critical ...
This open access book is about understanding the processes involved in the transformation of smallholder rice farming in the Lower Mekong Basin from a low-yielding subsistence activity to one producing the surpluses needed for national self-sufficiency and a high-value export industry. For centuries, farmers in the Basin have regarded rice as "...
This book, building on research initiated by scholars from the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Global Heritage and Development (CHGD) and ICOMOS Netherlands, presents multidisciplinary research that connects water to heritage. Through twenty-one chapters it explores landscapes, cities, engineering structures and buildings from around the world. It ...
Modeling and simulation are powerful tools for explaining the world, making predictions, designing things that work, and making them work better. Learning to use these tools can be difficult; this book is my attempt to make the experience as enjoyable and productive as possible.
By reading this book - and working on the exercises - you will lear...
Soso Tham (1873-1940), the acknowledged poet laureate of the Khasis of northeastern India, was one of the first writers to give written poetic form to the rich oral tradition of his people.
Poet of landscape, myth and memory, Soso Tham paid rich and poignant tribute to his tribe in his masterpiece The Old Days of the Khasis. Janet Hujon's v...
In a world where new technologies are being developed at a dizzying pace, how can we best approach oral genres that represent heritage? Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores the idea of sharing as a model to construct and disseminate the knowledge of literary heritage with the people who are represented by and in...
Containing ballads of martial heroism, tales of tragic lovers and visions of the nature of the world, Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet: Texts in Mongghul, Chinese, and English is a rich repository of songs collected amongst the Mongghul of the Seven Valleys, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau in western China. These songs rep...
You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful...
For thousands of years, people have been saying that the world is changing and will never again be the same. Yet the profound changes happening today are different, because they result from a specific technological development.
It is now possible, in principle, to remember everything that anyone says, writes, sings, draws, or photographs. Everythi...
This biography examines the long life of the traveller and author Stephen Graham. Graham walked across large parts of the Tsarist Empire in the years before 1917, describing his adventures in a series of books and articles that helped to shape attitudes towards Russia in Britain and the United States. In later years he travelled widely across Europ...
China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Yet, despite their proximity, their practical, local interactions with each other - and with their third neighbour Mongolia - are rarely discussed. The three countries share a boundary, but their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably dif...
Guido van Rossum created the Python programming language in the late 1980s. In contrast to other popular languages such as C, C++ , Java, and C#, Python strives to provide a simple but powerful syntax.
Python is used for software development at companies and organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, CERN, Industrial Light and Magic, and NAS...