This book delves into the widely held belief that the 21st century will be the "Asian Century" by examining the Asia's rapid economic development in the post-war era and the challenges it faces in forging ahead of world leaders in the West. The impact of the current turbulent global political climate on Asia is critically analyzed, employing a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, combini…
"Multilingualism is integral to the human condition. Hinging on the concept of Creative Multilingualism – the idea that language diversity and creativity are mutually enriching – this timely and thought-provoking volume shows how the concept provides a matrix for experimentation with ideas, approaches and methods. The book presents four years of joint research on Creative Multilingualism co…
Knowledge Services converges information management, knowledge management (KM), and strategic learning into a single enterprise-wide discipline for the benefit of the business or organization in which it is practiced. With the success of knowledge services as a management methodology, the practice has become an acknowledged framework for strategic knowledge management applicable to all business…
Nicholas Shea.
This open access book analyses the domestic politics of African dominant party regimes, most notably African governments’ survival strategies, to explain their variance of opinions and responses towards the reforming policies of the EU. The author discredits the widespread assumption that the growing presence of China in Africa has made the EU’s task of supporting governance reforms difficu…
This book includes contributions by leading researchers and industry thought leaders on various topics related to the essence of software engineering and their application in industrial projects. It offers a broad overview of research findings dealing with current practical software engineering issues and also pointers to potential future developments. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of ade…
This third open access volume of the handbook series deals with accelerator physics, design, technology and operations, as well as with beam optics, dynamics and diagnostics. A joint CERN-Springer initiative, the “Particle Physics Reference Library” provides revised and updated contributions based on previously published material in the well-known Landolt-Boernstein series on particle physi…
An Archaeology of Art and Writing offers an in-depth treatment of the image as material culture. Centring on early Egyptian bone, ivory, and wooden labels—one of the earliest inscribed and decorated object groups from burials in the lower Nile Valley—the research is anchored in the image as the site of material action. A key aim of this book is to outline a contextual and reflexive approach…
This open access book provides insight into the implementation of Life Cycle approaches along the entire business value chain, supporting environmental, social and economic sustainability related to the development of industrial technologies, products, services and policies; and the development and management of smart agricultural systems, smart mobility systems, urban infrastructures and energ…
Mathematics Education: Learning and Instruction
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book presents insights into the lived realities of children with disabilities in primary schools in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It examines specific cultural and societal characteristics of Ethiopia that influence the education of children with disabilities. The book presents findings drawn from interviews with, and participant observation of …
Mathematics Education; Educational Technology; Teaching and Teacher Education
Higher Education; Educational Policy and Politics; International and Comparative Education
Educational policy; Early childhood systems; Aims of early childhood education; Education reform
Now more than ever, as a worldwide STEM community, we need to know what pre-collegiate teachers and students explore, learn, and implement in relation to computer science and engineering education. As computer science and engineering education are not always “stand-alone” courses in pre-collegiate schools, how are pre-collegiate teachers and students learning about these topics? How can the…
This book offers an up-to-date review of our current understanding of climate change in the North Sea and adjacent areas, as well as its impact on ecosystems and socio-economic sectors. It provides a detailed assessment of climate change based on published scientific work compiled by independent international experts from climate-related disciplines such as oceanography, atmospheric sciences, m…
This book is Open Access under a CC BY licence.This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2018, which took place in Thessaloniki, Greece in April 2018, held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2018.The 19 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed …
Late in a career of more than sixty years, Thomas Burch, an internationally known social demographer, undertook a wide-ranging methodological critique of demography. This open access volume contains a selection of resulting papers, some previously unpublished, some published but not readily accessible [from past meetings of The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and its…
Over the past decades, rapid developments in digital and sensing technologies, such as the Cloud, Web and Internet of Things, have dramatically changed the way we live and work. The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we access, process and exploit Earth Observation data from satellites. This book reviews these megatrends…
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume examines how economic processes have worked upon social lives and social realities in Latin America during the past decades. Through tracing the effects of the neoliberal epoch into the era of the so-called pink tide, the book seeks to understand to what extent the turn to the left at the start of the millennium managed to …
This open access book provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analysing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use. The applications as well as the methodological contributions proposed in this book pay special attention to the combin…
This Open Access book celebrates Professor Peter Marwedel's outstanding achievements in compilers, embedded systems, and cyber-physical systems. The contributions in the book summarize the content of invited lectures given at the workshop “Embedded Systems” held at the Technical University Dortmund in early July 2019 in honor of Professor Marwedel's seventieth birthday. Provides a compre…
This book visualizes mortality dynamics in the Lexis diagram. While the standard approach of plotting death rates is also covered, the focus in this book is on the depiction of rates of mortality improvement over age and time. This rather novel approach offers a more intuitive understanding of the underlying dynamics, enabling readers to better understand whether period- or cohort-effects were …
This book offers a detailed account of a range of mHealth initiatives across South, Southeast and East Asia. It provides readers with deep insights into the challenges such initiatives face on the ground, and a view of the diverse cultural contexts shaping strategies for overcoming these challenges. The book brings together various discussions on the broader mHealth literature, and demonstrates…
Past research has comprehensively assessed the capabilities of satellite sensors operating at microwave frequencies, both active (SAR, scatterometers) and passive (radiometers), for the remote sensing of Earth’s surface. Besides brightness temperature and backscattering coefficient, microwave indices, defined as a combination of data collected at different frequencies and polarizations, revea…
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences, ISCIS 2016, held in Krakow, Poland, in October 2016. The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on smart algorithms; data classification and processing; stochastic modelling; p…
The multiple purposes of nature – livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists – have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a resource-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initi…
This book answers two central questions: firstly, is it at all possible to verify electronic equipment procured from untrusted vendors? Secondly, can I build trust into my products in such a way that I support verification by untrusting customers? In separate chapters the book takes readers through the state of the art in fields of computer science that can shed light on these questions. In a …
Sustainable development is the 21st Century’s wicked problem. After 40 years into this agenda have reversed only few unsustainable trends we hear the call for a paradigm shift, transformation, radical change or system innovations in order to finally change course. But what does this actually mean? And how do we put it into practice? This book describes the path ahead. It combines system tr…
Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the 'indignados' protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a 'cyberspa…
This book has brought together leading investigators who work in the new arena of brain connectomics. This includes ‘macro-connectome’ efforts to comprehensively chart long-distance pathways and functional networks; ‘micro-connectome’ efforts to identify every neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, and glial process within restricted brain regions; and ‘meso-connectome’ efforts to systema…
The book is written for active learners ñ those keen on cutting their own path through the complex and at times hardly comprehensible world of THEORY in International Relations. To aid this process as much as possible, this book employs the didactical and methodical concept of integrating teaching and self-study. The criteria for structured learning about IR theory will be derived from an exte…
The book serves both as a reference for various scaled models with corresponding dimensionless numbers, and as a resource for learning the art of scaling. A special feature of the book is the emphasis on how to create software for scaled models, based on existing software for unscaled models. Scaling (or non-dimensionalization) is a mathematical technique that greatly simplifies the setting…
This open access book details tools and procedures for data collections of hard-to-reach, hard-to-survey populations. Inside, readers will discover first-hand insights from experts who share their successes as well as their failures in their attempts to identify and measure human vulnerabilities across the life course. Coverage first provides an introduction on studying vulnerabilities based on…
Governments have known since the 1960s that smoking results in irreversible health damage. This open access book examines why governments have done so little to combat this when they have been aware of the problem and its solutions for decades. What are the strategies and decisions that make a difference, given that policy environments are often not conducive to change? Taking the Netherlands a…
The optical world is continuously and rapidly evolving, and new challenges arise every day. As a result of these rapid changes, the need for up-to-date texts that address this growing field from an interdisciplinary perspective persists. This book presents an overview of new optical communication technologies and a bird's-eye view of some of the more promising technologies among them. The book …
This Open Access handbook published at the IAMG's 50th anniversary, presents a compilation of invited path-breaking research contributions by award-winning geoscientists who have been instrumental in shaping the IAMG. It contains 45 chapters that are categorized broadly into five parts (i) theory, (ii) general applications, (iii) exploration and resource estimation, (iv) reviews, and (v) remini…
After violent protests all over the country had forced President Suharto to step down in 1998, Indonesia successfully made the transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy. In this book Indonesian scholars attached to Islamic universities and Dutch researchers investigate what happened since and what the consequences are of the growing influence of orthodoxy and radicalism, which alrea…
What does it mean to be human in a world of technology? What could be the role of religion in responding to the ecological crisis? Should we be concerned about the modification of food, and even of ourselves? Who do we trust to make decisions regarding our common future? What do we use our technology for? These are not questions for experts only. How can the wider public be involved? Do experts…
This open access book brings out the state of the art on how informatics-based tools are used and expected to be used in nanomaterials research. There has been great progress in the area in which “big-data” generated by experiments or computations are fully utilized to accelerate discovery of new materials, key factors, and design rules. Data-intensive approaches play indispensable roles in…
This book demystifies the models we use to simulate present and future climates, allowing readers to better understand how to use climate model results. In order to predict the future trajectory of the Earth’s climate, climate-system simulation models are necessary. When and how do we trust climate model predictions? The book offers a framework for answering this question. It provides readers…
This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achiev…
This open access book surveys the frontier of scientific river research and provides examples to guide management towards a sustainable future of riverine ecosystems. Principal structures and functions of the biogeosphere of rivers are explained; key threats are identified, and effective solutions for restoration and mitigation are provided. Rivers are among the most threatened ecosystems of…
This volume brings together excellent scholarship and innovative policy discussion to demonstrate the essential role of higher education in the development of Africa and of the world at large. Based on deep knowledge of the university system in several African countries, this book will reshape the debate on development in the global information economy for years to come. It should be mandatory …
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 future.This open access book provides a significant…
The standing of French Muslims is undercut by a predominant and persistent elite public discourse that frames Muslims as failed and incomplete French citizens. This situation fosters the very separations, exclusions, and hierarchies it claims to deplore as Muslims face discrimination in education, housing, and employment. In Constructing Muslims in France, Jennifer Fredette provides a deft empi…
Flexicurity is a European policy agenda seeking to increase both flexibility and security in the labour-market. This book argues that it needs a revision: Although flexicurity is set out to change the way Europeans work and live, and even though it is being justified by workers’ needs, flexicurity lacks of a clear and democratically justified vision of society. Flexicurity is confronted here …
"Noam Chomsky visited India in 1996 and 2001 and spoke on a wide range of subjects, from democracy and corporate propaganda to the nature of the world order and the role of intellectuals in society. He captivated audiences with his lucid challenge of dominant political analyses, the engaging style of his talks, and his commitment to social equality as well as individual freedom. Chomsky’s ear…
Using a novel approach to consider the available literature and research, this book focuses on the psychology of social media based on the assumption that the experience of being in a social media has an impact on both our identity and social relationships. In order to ‘be online’, an individual has to create an online presence – they have to share information about themselves online. Thi…
Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This open access book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity. The results of their work, Rethinking Productiv…