Globalization is a powerful force with far reaching impacts on education and education policy. The growth of large scale international surveys of student achievement and the increasing role played by intergovernmental agencies in education means that the influence that globalization exerts on education is likely to increase even further in the futu...
This book presents a person-centered exploration of student profiles, using variables related to motivation to do school mathematics derived from the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data. Statistical cluster analysis is used to identify groups of students with similar motivational profiles, across grades and...
This book contains the proceedings of the International Symposium on the Mechanisms of Sexual Reproduction in Animals and Plants, where many plant and animal reproductive biologists gathered to discuss their recent progress in investigating the shared mechanisms and factors involved in sexual reproduction. This now is the first book that reviews re...
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...
This open access book describes the three planning approaches and legacy impacts for the Olympic Games in one locale: the city of Los Angeles, USA. The author critically compares the similarities and differences of the LA Olympics by reviewing the 1932 and 1984 Olympics and by analyzing the concurrent planning process for the 2028 Olympics. The au...
This free book explores the fundamentals of computer music and functional programming through the Haskell programming language. Functional programming is typically considered difficult to learn. This introduction in the context of creating music will allow students and professionals with a musical inclination to leverage their experience to help un...
This book helps students to master the material of a standard US undergraduate first course in Linear Algebra.
The material is standard in that the subjects covered are Gaussian reduction, vector spaces, linear maps, determinants, and eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Another standard is book's audience: sophomores or juniors, usually with a ba...
This open access book explores the amazing similarity between paths taken by people and many other things in life, and its impact on the way we live, teach and learn.
Offering insights into the new scientific field of paths as part of the science of networks, it entertainingly describes the universal nature of paths in large networked structures. ...
As America's most populous state goes, so goes the nation. And within that state, the 38 counties comprising South Texas - a highly populated, largely Hispanic area characterized by high uninsured rates and low numbers of health care providers - are emblematic of nationwide crises in public health.
The South Texas Health Status Review: A Heal...
This manuscript discusses the potentials of the approaches as mentioned below to monitor the AIVs in WMW. Molecular diagnostic platforms enable for accurate detection of the AIVs in the feces of infected birds. Similar technologies can be used to determine the bird species through DNA barcoding, enabling non-invasive research on the epidemiology of...
This book seeks to identify the ethical spirit of European Union (EU) law, a context in which we can observe a trend towards increasing references to the terms 'ethics' and 'morality.' This aspect is all the more important because EU law is now affecting more and more areas of national law, including such sensitive ones as the p...
This book provides a practical and self-contained overview of the Gene Ontology (GO), the leading project to organize biological knowledge on genes and their products across genomic resources. Written for biologists and bioinformaticians, it covers the state-of-the-art of how GO annotations are made, how they are evaluated, and what sort of analyse...
This book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where "search" can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected ...
This book focuses on the linear selection index (LSI) theory and its statistical properties. It addresses the single-stage LSI theory by assuming that economic weights are fixed and known - or fixed, but unknown - to predict the net genetic merit in the phenotypic, marker and genomic context. Further, it shows how to combine the LSI theory with the...
This edited collection provides a comprehensive analysis of the differences and similarities between civil legal aid schemes in the Nordic countries whilst outlining recent legal aid transformations in their respective welfare states. Based on in-depth studies of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, the authors compare these cases with le...
This open access work presents selected results from the European research and innovation project IMPROVE which yielded novel data-based solutions to enhance machine reliability and efficiency in the fields of simulation and optimization, condition monitoring, alarm management, and quality prediction.
Prof. Dr. Oliver Niggemann is Professor for Ar...
It overviews the poisoning which occurred in the 1950s and 1960s among the residents in Minamata who ate seafood contaminated with methylmercury discharged from the chemical factory, Chisso Corporation. It describes the history, symptoms pathogenesis and research on the causal agent, and discusses the responses of Chisso and the national and local ...
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are set to become the main computers that virtually all people will own and carry with them at all times. And yet,mobile devices are not yet used for all computing tasks. A project at Microsoft Research was created to answer a simple question: "It is possible to create interesting apps directly on...
This book takes a look at fully automated, autonomous vehicles and discusses many open questions: How can autonomous vehicles be integrated into the current transportation system with diverse users and human drivers? Where do automated vehicles fall under current legal frameworks? What risks are associated with automation and how will society respo...
This book examines the role of citizens in sustainable energy transitions across Europe. It explores energy problem framing, policy approaches and practical responses to the challenge of securing clean, affordable and sustainable energy for all citizens, focusing on households as the main unit of analysis. The book revolves around ten contributions...
This book asks why and how some of the developing countries have "emerged" under a set of similar global conditions, what led individual countries to choose the particular paths that led to their "emergence," and what challenges confront them. If we are to understand the nature of major risks and uncertainties in the world, we m...
This free book presents the assessment framework for IEA's International Computer an Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2018, which is designed to assess how well students are prepared for study, work and life in a digital world. The study measures international differences in students' computer and information literacy (CIL): their abili...
This book draws on a broad study on violence against men, from both male and female partners in Norway, to contribute to the research on intimate partner violence. It identifies similarities in men's experiences and backgrounds, including in their perceptions of their own victimisation. Marianne Inez Lien and Jørgen Lorentzen argue that the t...
S-BPM stands for "subject-oriented business process management" and focuses on subjects that represent the entities (people, programs etc.) that are actively engaged in processes. S-BPM has become one of the most widely discussed approaches for process professionals. Its potential particularly lies in the integration of advanced informati...
This book analyses Iberian expansion by using knowledge accumulated in recent years to test some of the most important theories regarding Europe's economic development. Adopting a comparative perspective, it considers the impact of early globalization on Iberian and Western European institutions, social development and political economies. In ...
This book is an original contribution to the knowledge on fishing and research associated with one of the most enigmatic fish of our seas: bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus (L.). Based on available evidence, it reconstructs the possible methods used to catch large spawners in the Strait of Gibraltar thousands of years ago and describes the much more re...
The subject of this book relates to protein ligands with particular structural and complexation properties. They are composed of self-assembled molecules, capable of penetrating as a unit into proteins outside the binding site. The ribbon-like supramolecular system only permits the penetration of self-assembled molecules into the protein-body and f...
This book offers something for everyone working with market segmentation: practical guidance for users of market segmentation solutions; organisational guidance on implementation issues; guidance for market researchers in charge of collecting suitable data; and guidance for data analysts with respect to the technical and statistical aspects of mark...
This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15–16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28–30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial I...
Predicting the time needed to complete a project, task or daily activity can be difficult and people frequently underestimate how long an activity will take. This book sheds light on why and when this happens, what we should do to avoid it and how to give more realistic time predictions. It describes methods for predicting time usage in situations ...
This book presents the first detailed study of one of the most important masterpieces of Renaissance cartography, Martin Waldseemüller's Carta marina of 1516. By transcribing, translating into English, and detailing the sources of all of the descriptive texts on the map, as well as the sources of many of the images, the book makes the map ava...
This book discusses a variety of important but unprecedented ways in which psychology can be useful to philosophy. The early chapters illustrate this theme via comparisons between Chinese and Western philosophy. It is argued that the Chinese notion of a heart-mind is superior to the Western concept of mind, but then, more even-handedly, the relativ...