This unique open book features a selection of Living Cases on Corporate Governance, which were developed and compiled by chairpersons, members of the board of directors, and CEOs in various countries, working in close collaboration with prominent researchers. Each Living Case addresses a current issue that a given company or institution needs to re...
This open book provides the first-ever comparative study on criminal policy concerning the illicit trade of tobacco, conducted among four comparatively new EU Member States (Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Romania) and two "old" EU countries (Germany and Italy). The book addresses the national legal frameworks, current criminological situ...
This open book evaluates, from an economic perspective, various measures introduced in Japan to prevent climate change. Although various countries have implemented such policies in response to the pressing issue of climate change, the effectiveness of those programs has not been sufficiently compared. In particular, policy evaluations in the Asian ...
This open book presents selected papers from International Symposium on Mathematics, Quantum Theory, and Cryptography (MQC), which was held on September 25-27, 2019 in Fukuoka, Japan. The international symposium MQC addresses the mathematics and quantum theory underlying secure modeling of the post quantum cryptography including e.g. mathematical s...
This open book reviews the water-agro-food and socio-eco-system of the Seine River basin (76,000 km2), and offers a historical perspective on the river's long-term contamination. The Seine basin is inhabited by circa 17 million people and is impacted by intensive agricultural practices and industrial activities. These pressures have gradually ...
This open volume of the AIDA Europe Research Series on Insurance Law and Regulation offers the first comprehensive legal and regulatory analysis of the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD). The IDD came into force on 1 October 2018 and regulates the distribution of insurance products in the EU. The book examines the main changes accompanying the ...
This open volume reveals the hidden power of the script we read in and how it shapes and drives our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures. Expanding on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (i.e., the idea that language affects the way we think), this volume proposes the "Script Relativity Hypothesis" (i.e., the idea that the script in whi...
This open methodological book summarises existing analysing techniques using data from PIAAC, a study initiated by the OECD that assesses key cognitive and occupational skills of the adult population in more than 40 countries. The approximately 65 PIAAC datasets that has been published worldwide to date has been widely received and used by an inter...
This open book, like Rayleigh's classic Theory of Sound, focuses on experiments and on approximation techniques rather than mathematical rigor. The second edition has benefited from comments and corrections provided by many acousticians, in particular those who have used the first edition in undergraduate and graduate courses. For example, pha...
Written by a group of international experts in the field and the result of over ten years of collaboration, it allows students and readers to gain to gain a detailed understanding of scar and wound treatment - a topic still dispersed among various disciplines. The content is divided into three parts for easy reference. The first part focuses on the...
This open book discusses the impact of human-induced global climate change on the Indian subcontinent and regional monsoon, the adjoining Indian Ocean and the Himalayas. It also examines the regional climate change projections based on the climate models used by the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and national climate change modeling studies usi...
This open book focuses on the issue of sustainability standards from the perspective of both global governance frameworks and emerging economies. It stems from the recognition that the accelerated pace of economic globalization has generated production and consumption patterns that are generating sustainability concerns. Sustainability standards (a...
This open volume aims to methodologically improve our understanding of biodiversity by linking disciplines that incorporate remote sensing, and uniting data and perspectives in the fields of biology, landscape ecology, and geography. The book provides a framework for how biodiversity can be detected and evaluated - focusing particularly on plants -...
This open book shows how the politics of migration affect community building in the 21st century, drawing on both retrogressive and progressive forms of mobilization. It elaborates theoretically and shows empirically how the two master frames of nostalgia and hope are used in local, national and transnational settings, in and outside conventional f...
This open access book is the first published guide about how to analyse data produced by the EQ-5D, one of the most widely used Patient Reported Outcomes questionnaires world wide. The authors provide practical, clear and comprehensive guidance in five concise chapters. Following an overview of the EQ-5D and its analysis, we describe how the questi...
This open brief provides a systematic analysis of current trends and requirements in the areas of knowledge and competence in the context of the project "(A) Higher Education Digital (AHEAD) - International Horizon Scanning / Trend Analysis on Digital Higher Education." It examines the latest developments in learning theory, didactics, an...
This open book aims to show which factors have been decisive in the rise of successful countries. Never before have so many people been so well off. However, prosperity is not a law of nature; it has to be worked for. A liberal economy stands at the forefront of this success - not as a political system, but as a set of economic rules promoting comp...
Organic waste composting is another excellent example to demonstrate the power and the benefits of nexus thinking. Even though organic waste composting itself is not a new topic, those who want to start a new project or align an ongoing project with nexus thinking, find it difficult to gather the necessary information. With nine case studies from f...
This open book provides an overview of the dissertations of the five nominees for the Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering in 2019. The prize, kindly sponsored by the Gerlind & Ernst Denert Stiftung, is awarded for excellent work within the discipline of Software Engineering, which includes methods, tools and procedures for better an...
This open book describes the Reading Success project, in which a 5-step, assessment-to- intervention process, based on the Simple View of Reading, was used within a primary school setting in Australia to better support those students who struggle with reading. It provides an easily accessible overview of each step of the process involved in impleme...
This open book presents the proceedings of the 3rd Indo-German Conference on Sustainability in Engineering held at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, on September 16 - 17, 2019. Intended to foster the synergies between research and education, the conference is one of the joint activities of the BITS Pilani and TU Braunschweig...
This open book describes and reviews the development of the quality control mechanisms and methodologies associated with IEA's extensive program of educational research. A group of renowned international researchers, directly involved in the design and execution of IEA's international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), describe the operatio...
This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020.
The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topica...
This open book brings together oral histories that record the experiences of individuals with intellectual disabilities in Shanghai as they participate in their careers. Employees with intellectual disabilities describe their experiences seeking, attaining, and maintaining employment. Their managers, colleagues, and family members also provide keen...
This open book focuses on robot introspection, which has a direct impact on physical human - robot interaction and long-term autonomy, and which can benefit from autonomous anomaly monitoring and diagnosis, as well as anomaly recovery strategies. In robotics, the ability to reason, solve their own anomalies and proactively enrich owned knowledge is...
This open book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2020, which was planned to be held during June 8-12, 2020, at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was postponed until an undetermined date.XP is the premier agile software devel...
This open book contains the oral histories that were inspired by the work of the Special Olympics in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of its founding. The foreword and prefatory materials provide an overview of the Special Olympics and its growth in the People’s Republic of China. The sections that follow record interview transcripts of ind...
This open access book offers a practical guide into research ethics for undergraduate students in the social sciences. A step-by-step approach of the most viable issues, in-depth discussions of case histories and a variety of didactical tools will aid the student to grasp the issues at hand and help him or her develop strategies to deal with them.T...
This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2020, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2020.*
The 17 full papers and 23 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. They cover topics such as: Io...
This open book highlights the major outcomes of the fourth edition of the Future of Higher Education - Bologna Process Researchers Conference (January 2020), which has already established itself as a landmark in the European higher education environment. The conference provides a unique forum for dialogue between researchers, experts and policy mak...
This open book focuses on theoretical and empirical intersections between governance, knowledge and space from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions elucidate how knowledge is a prerequisite as well as a driver of governance efficacy, and conversely, how governance affects the creation and use of knowledge and innovation in geographic...
This open book is an encyclopaedic analysis of the current and future energy system of the world's most populous country and second biggest economy. What happens in China impacts the planet. In the past 40 years China has achieved one of the most remarkable economic growth rates in history. Its GDP has risen by a factor of 65, enabling 850,000...