Search results for ""Springer International Publishing AG""

This open access book presents an interdisciplinary approach to reveal biases in English news articles reporting on a given political event. The approach named person-oriented framing analysis identifies the coverage’s different perspectives on the event by assessing how articles portray the persons involved in the event. In contrast to prior automated approaches, the identified frames are more meaningful and substantially present in person-oriented news coverage. The book is structured in seven chapters: Chapter 1 presents a few of the severe problems caused by slanted news coverage and identifies the research gap that motivated the research described in this thesis. Chapter 2 discusses manual analysis concepts and exemplary studies from the social sciences and automated approaches, mostly from computer science and computational linguistics, to analyze and reveal media bias. This way, it identifies the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches for identifying and revealing media bias. Chapter 3 discusses the solution design space to address the identified research gap and introduces person-oriented framing analysis (PFA), a new approach to identify substantial frames and to reveal slanted news coverage. Chapters 4 and 5 detail target concept analysis and frame identification, the first and second component of PFA. Chapter 5 also introduces the first large-scale dataset and a novel model for target-dependent sentiment classification (TSC) in the news domain. Eventually, Chapter 6 introduces Newsalyze, a prototype system to reveal biases to non-expert news consumers by using the PFA approach. In the end, Chapter 7 summarizes the thesis and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the thesis to derive ideas for future research on media bias. This book mainly targets researchers and graduate students from computer science, computational linguistics, political science, and further social sciences who want to get an overview of the relevant state of the art in the other related disciplines and understand and tackle the issue of bias from a more effective, interdisciplinary viewpoint.

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This volume describes the thinking on sustainable development and a variety of initiatives across Europe, illustrating regional efforts to foster sustainable communities and ecological and social innovation. It contains various contributions which showcase examples of thinking, economic and social structures and in consumption and production patterns needed, to implement the SDGs.This book is part of the "100 papers to accelerate the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals initiative".

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This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

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Hip pain is one of the most common reasons for patient visits to orthopedic, physiatrist, primary care and sports medicine offices. Most books that cover this topic review it as a chapter within a larger book on orthopedics as a whole, or they focus on one specific aspect of hip pathology, such as osteoarthritis. This practical text is an evidence-based, user-friendly review of the literature for the breadth of hip pathologies that present to the busy practitioner. Opening with a review of the relevant anatomy, subsequent chapters discuss bursitis and tendonitis, labral tears, impingement syndrome, and osteoarthritis. Additional chapters cover hip pain in the pediatric patient, sports trauma and fractures, and rheumatologic and infectious disease considerations. And while reviewing pathology and its diagnosis and treatment is important, proceeding through real case studies is extremely valuable in bringing the diagnosis and treatment of hip pathologies to life, hence an engaging section of clinical case material rounds out the presentation.Taken together, A Case-Based Approach to Hip Pain will be an ideal resource for musculoskeletal medicine practitioners of all types.

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This book focuses on the challenges to biomedical education posed by the lockdowns and restrictions to on campus teaching brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and highlights the tools and digital visualization technologies that have been successfully developed and used for remote teaching. Biomedical education for science, medical, dental and allied health professionals relies on teaching visual and tactile knowledge using practice-based approaches. This has been delivered for decades via on-campus lectures, workshops and laboratories, teaching practical skills as well as fundamental knowledge and understanding. However, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that education across the globe had to pivot very quickly to be able to deliver these skills and knowledge in a predominantly online environment. This brought with it many challenges, as Higher Education staff, had to adapt to deliver these visual subjects remotely. This book addresses the challenges and solutions faced by Higher Education staff in teaching visual content in distance education. Chapters include literature reviews, original research, and pedagogical reflections for a wide range of biomedical subjects, degrees such as medicine, dentistry and veterinary sciences with examples from undergraduate and postgraduate settings. The goal of the book is to provide a compendium of expertise based on evidence gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as reflections on the challenges and lessons learned from this dramatic shift in teaching. It also presents new examples of best practices that have emerged from this experience to ensure that they are not lost as we return to on-campus learning in a new era of biomedical teaching. This book will be of interest to anyone looking for a helpful reference point when designing online or blended teaching for visual practice-based subjects.

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This book provides a new model to explore discoverability and enhance the meaning of information. The authors have coined the term epidata, which includes items and circumstances that impact the expression of the data in a document, but are not part of the ordinary process of retrieval systems. Epidata affords pathways and points to details that cast light on proximities that might otherwise go unknown. In addition, epidata are clues to mis-and dis-information discernment. There are many ways to find needed information; however, finding the most useable information is not an easy task. The book explores the uses of proximity and the concept of epidata that increases the probability of finding functional information. The authors sketch a constellation of proximities, present examples of attempts to accomplish proximity, and provoke a discussion of the role of proximity in the field. In addition, the authors suggest that proximity is a thread between retrieval constructs based on known topics, predictable relations, and types of information seeking that lie outside constructs such as browsing, stumbling, encountering, detective work, art making, and translation.

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This textbook provides an introduction to methods for solving nonlinear partial differential equations (NLPDEs). After the introduction of several PDEs drawn from science and engineering, readers are introduced to techniques to obtain exact solutions of NLPDEs. The chapters include the following topics: Nonlinear PDEs are Everywhere; Differential Substitutions; Point and Contact Transformations; First Integrals; and Functional Separability. Readers are guided through these chapters and are provided with several detailed examples. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises illustrating the material presented in each chapter. This Second Edition includes a new method of generating contact transformations and focuses on a solution method (parametric Legendre transformations) to solve a particular class of two nonlinear PDEs.

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This open access handbook describes foundational issues, methodological approaches and examples on how to analyse and model data using Computational Social Science (CSS) for policy support. Up to now, CSS studies have mostly developed on a small, proof-of concept, scale that prevented from unleashing its potential to provide systematic impact to the policy cycle, as well as from improving the understanding of societal problems to the definition, assessment, evaluation, and monitoring of policies. The aim of this handbook is to fill this gap by exploring ways to analyse and model data for policy support, and to advocate the adoption of CSS solutions for policy by raising awareness of existing implementations of CSS in policy-relevant fields. To this end, the book explores applications of computational methods and approaches like big data, machine learning, statistical learning, sentiment analysis, text mining, systems modelling, and network analysis to different problems in the social sciences. The book is structured into three Parts: the first chapters on foundational issues open with an exposition and description of key policymaking areas where CSS can provide insights and information. In detail, the chapters cover public policy, governance, data justice and other ethical issues. Part two consists of chapters on methodological aspects dealing with issues such as the modelling of complexity, natural language processing, validity and lack of data, and innovation in official statistics. Finally, Part three describes the application of computational methods, challenges and opportunities in various social science areas, including economics, sociology, demography, migration, climate change, epidemiology, geography, and disaster management. The target audience of the book spans from the scientific community engaged in CSS research to policymakers interested in evidence-informed policy interventions, but also includes private companies holding data that can be used to study social sciences and are interested in achieving a policy impact.

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This edited volume explores and extends themes in contemporary educational research on teacher preparation and the evolution in social justice education to antiracist pedagogy. These times call for teacher education to reconsider how the work devoted to social justice is explicit and intentional about its commitment to a racially just society. What does it mean for teacher education to seize this moment to confront racism and inequities that continue to perpetuate in society and school? The book highlights efforts that are being augmented to prepare teacher candidates and future faculty to address systemic racism in their teaching practices.

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The aim of the book is to resolve the question of whether multiple sanctioning systems are contrary to the ne bis in idem under the regulation provided by Protocol 7 to the ECHR and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The first part is a comparative study regarding the lawfulness of multiple sanctioning systems under the ne bis in idem, studying the evolution and the current state of the case law of the United States Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The second part of the book critically analyses three problems with the case law of the ECtHR and the CJEU. Part three deals with reconceptualizing the prohibition of multiple punishment and the prohibition of multiple prosecutions. Finally, the fourth part addresses other possible protections against multiple sanctioning systems. Two other safeguards that limit multiple sanctioning systems are the prohibition of disproportionate sanctions and the right to be tried within a reasonable time.

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The book explores approaches, methods and best practices related to health promotion in urban areas. Thanks to the increasingly tight connection among urbanism, architecture, bioethics, anthropology, sociology and medicine, we are now reaching an “ecological” health perspective. This new viewpoint has pushed the study of social health determinants and their unequal distribution in the population, resulting in the study of the generation of structurally-determined differences in health and healthcare. There is the need to make use of a unitary framework in order to understand the intertwining of multidimensional dynamics that define the urban context and the need to disseminate, enhance, and improve existing interventions in the field. This volume consequently results in the discussion and comparison of contents and methods to be implemented in multidisciplinary interventions related to the promotion of community-based healthcare and health in the urban setting. The book represents a useful opportunity for scientific growth and international sharing of methodologies that can help develop a common language and approach to be shared across different academic spheres. This is not only an exchange of knowledge among different fields of study, but also the creation of foundations for creating an increasingly complex network of scientific culture and operational collaborations to transfer knowledge and attract academic and public attention, influencing decision-makers and gaining advocacy accordingly.

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This open access book LNCS 13353 constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Electronic Voting, E-Vote-ID 2022, held in Bregenz, Austria, in October 2022. The 10 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The conference collected the most relevant debates on the development of Electronic Voting, from aspects relating to security and usability through to practical experiences and applications of voting systems, also including legal, social, or political aspects, amongst others.

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The volume LNAI 13546 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, TAROS 2022, held in Culham, UK, in September 2022. The 14 full papers and 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. Organized in the topical sections "Algorithms" and "Systems", they discuss significant findings and advances in the following areas: Robotic Grippers and Manipulation; Soft Robotics, Sensing and Mobile Robots; Robotic Learning, Mapping and Planning; Robotic Systems and Applications.

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Welington de Melo (Guapé, 1946 - Rio de Janeiro, 2016) was a brazilian mathematician whose contributions were deeply connected with Smale and Palis school of dynamical systems. In particular the classification of smooth dynamical systems and the study of its generic properties are recurrent topics in his work. This book collected some of his most significant contributions, from his early work on structural stability of diffeomorphisms in the 1970's to his groundbreaking results on one-dimensional dynamics. Indeed his interest in one-dimensional dynamics is a clear distinction from early influences. An effervescent work in discrete dynamics on the interval and the circle started in the 1970s. It was soon realized that those systems have surprisingly rich dynamics. But, at the same time, an impressive set of tools were developed to study them. There are two main sets of tools. Real methods such as bounded distortion control via Schwarzian derivative and later cross-ratio estimates allows one to understand some of its features. However, often complex methods, with deep connections with Teichmuller theory, are necessary to obtain some of the most striking results. This is especially true in renormalization theory, a theme Welington was very fond of, and that appears prominently in his collected works. Welington played an important role in the development on both fronts, and this book is a testament of his influence in the field which resonates to this day.

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This book analyzes the use of the mobile Internet against the background of gender bias and Covid-19, currently two of the most important and pressing problems of the Global South. The book argues that the degree of benefits from this new technology depends heavily on the way it is actually used and that most new technologies are developed for the conditions prevailing in rich countries, where they tend to be quite easily adopted and used. In the Global South, by contrast, a paucity of digital skills and other factors make the potentially valuable benefits from the Internet much more difficult to derive. Using empirical data recently provided by the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), the book examines the existence and extent of the digital divide between males and females in mobile Internet use, which constitutes a new form of divide. It sheds light on the acute difficulty for first-time mobile Internet users in the Global South, and especially Sub-Saharan Africa, to learn the digital skills that are needed to use the said technology effectively, with a special focus on how these users acquire the required knowledge, without having undergone the process of learning by doing. The book further discusses the determinants of digital skills in the Global South, as well as major factors underlying the extent to which different users actually benefit from the mobile Internet, such as gender, location, age, and education. Finally, it investigates how womens' use of the Internet has been altered by the pandemic in the Global South.This book will appeal to students, researchers, and scholars of development economics and development studies, as well as policy-makers interested in a better understanding of the impact of gender bias and Covid-19 on mobile internet use in the Global South.

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Nowadays, data analysis is becoming an appealing topic due to the emergence of new data types, dimensions, and sources. This motivates the development of probabilistic/statistical approaches and tools to cope with these data. Different communities of experts, namely statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, econometricians, and psychologists are more and more interested in facing this challenge. As a consequence, there is a clear need to build bridges between all these communities for Data Science.This book contains more than fifty selected recent contributions aiming to establish the above referred bridges. These contributions address very different and relevant aspects such as imprecise probabilities, information theory, random sets and random fuzzy sets, belief functions, possibility theory, dependence modelling and copulas, clustering, depth concepts, dimensionality reduction of complex data and robustness.

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This book presents frontier research on the use of computational methods to model complex interactions in economics and finance. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and simulations offer effective means of analyzing and learning from large as well as new types of data. These computational tools have permeated various subfields of economics, finance, and also across different schools of economic thought. Through 16 chapters written by pioneers in economics, finance, computer science, psychology, complexity and statistics/econometrics, the book introduces their original research and presents the findings they have yielded.Theoretical and empirical studies featured in this book draw on a variety of approaches such as agent-based modeling, numerical simulations, computable economics, as well as employing tools from artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. The use of computational approaches to perform counterfactual thought experiments are also introduced, which help transcend the limits posed by traditional mathematical and statistical tools.The book also includes discussions on methodology, epistemology, history and issues concerning prediction, validation, and inference, all of which have become pertinent with the increasing use of computational approaches in economic analysis.

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This handbook compiles the most up-to-date research on transnational families. It employs a dialogue between classical approaches and cutting-edge directions in transnational family research to identify continuities and changes in terms of socioeconomic disparities and actors, and to analyze coexistence. Further, the volume adopts a twofold global and international comparative perspective. On the one hand, it focuses on different migratory flows around the world and describes their entangled logics; on the other, it is written by an international group of contributors, with a diverse range of professional backgrounds. Their contributions are based on sound empirical research, and explore geographical regions around the world. The handbook presents different thematic perspectives on transnational families, including an analytical focus on gender, global sociodemographic inequalities, power asymmetries, and border- and mobility regimes, as well as the organization of transnational care, transnational fatherhood, ageing, family reunions and return. It also includes a variety of methodological approaches to transnational family research, ranging from ethnography, biographical research, and life-course methods, to multi-sited approaches and quantitative surveys. Investigating an emergent debate, it sheds new light on migratory fluxes, their common and specific determinants, the types of actors involved, and ways to empirically and methodologically approach them. This is a must-read reference for social scientists interested in family research, migration, and gender studies. Chapter 7 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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This book is an academic publication about the global development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and major MOOC platforms worldwide in the past decade, as well as the outlook of MOOCs in the future, with an emphasis on Greater China. The book also discusses the upsurge of the demand for online learning and MOOCs during the COVID-19 pandemic.The book is divided into three main parts - Part I: Overview of MOOCs introduces the origin and history of MOOCs and the development of MOOC platforms in Greater China and the global context; Part II: Key Issues discuss the MOOC policies, innovative pedagogy, technology, and ecosystems worldwide; and Part III: Beyond MOOCs probes into the roles and benefits of MOOCs in times of crises, as well as the outlook of MOOCs in the future. In terms of topic diversity, the book contains a comprehensive investigation of the past and latest MOOC developments, extracting and elaborating on relevant information regarding platforms, policies, pedagogy, technology, and ecosystems. Subsequently, in-depth analyses of MOOC data are utilized to deduce the current trends related to the MOOC movement and to extrapolate the likeliest direction of development for MOOCs in the years to come. The book can inform policymakers, education institutions, course instructors, platform developers, investors, researchers, and individual learners of MOOCs about critical information on the present and future of MOOC development, assisting them in making crucial decisions on what initiatives can optimize their advantages in the sector.

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This monograph, now in its 2nd edition with 31 new chapters and significant updates, is the first book of its kind written specifically for graduate students and clinicians. The monograph is based on the 4-volume treatise, Handbook of the Cerebellum and Cerebellar Disorders (Springer, 2013; 2nd edition: 2022), the definitive reference for scientists and neurologists in the field of cerebellar neurobiology and related areas. There have been fundamental advances in the basic science and clinical neurology of the cerebellum and its role in sensorimotor function and cognition. Essentials of the Cerebellum and Cerebellar Disorders makes this large and expanding body of knowledge readily accessible to trainees and clinicians alike. It is organized into easy to read and short chapters that are ideal for students and clinicians. The most common cerebellar disorders encountered in the clinic are covered. The editors are world leaders in the field, and the chapters are authored by an international panel of experts drawn from cerebellar laboratories and ataxia clinics throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Essentials provides a solid grounding in the field of cerebellar research and ataxiology from cerebellar cellular biology and circuity to clinical practice, and it serves as a springboard to a deeper appreciation of both the principles and the complexities of cerebellar neurobiology. Clinicians are expected to have a deep appreciation of cerebellar disorders, not only in specialized ataxia clinics but also in adult and pediatric neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and neuropsychology practices, and in outpatient and inpatient rehabilitation settings. This book is an indispensable resource for students and practitioners navigating the evolving field of cerebellar motor and cognitive neurology. It also links to the more expansive Handbook for those who need to explore the topics in this monograph in greater depth.

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This book presents a fresh approach to the communicability of narratives, revealing the cognitive underpinnings of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatistic model. It demonstrates how abductive processes modify habits of belief and action in what Peirce refers to as double consciousness. Abductions generated during double consciousness paradigms have increased efficacy compared to instinctual abductions. Novel inferences from working memory become consciously integrated with existing long-term memory units which permits fuller consideration of the plausibility of propositions. Special attention is given to children’s prelinguistic means to represent propositional or assertory conflicts, and to resolve these conflicts via listening and re-telling narrators’ accounts. Overall, this book serves both a theoretical and applied purpose. It is intended to support innovative therapeutic interventions to facilitate the (re)construction of narratives by adults and children. Its practical applications and theoretical grounding will appeal to graduate students and scholars alike, who wish to examine narrative as an interdisciplinary enterprise—an ontological and cultural phenomenon (narration by way of action/image sequences), not just a literary/linguistic paradigm. Ultimately, this account presents narrative as a modal forum to resolve logical and practical conflicts, compelling the interpreter to become an involved partner in the narrated event itself.

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This two-volume set LNCS 13398 and LNCS 13399 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2022, held in Dortmund, Germany, in September 2022.The 87 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The conference presents a study of computing methods derived from natural models. Amorphous Computing, Artificial Life, Artificial Ant Systems, Artificial Immune Systems, Artificial Neural Networks, Cellular Automata, Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Computing, Self-Organizing Systems, Chemical Computation, Molecular Computation, Quantum Computation, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence approaches using Natural Computing methods are just some of the topics covered in this field.

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th IFIP TC 5, TC 12, WG 8.4, WG 8.9, WG 12.9 International Cross-Domain Conference, CD-MAKE 2022, held in Vienna, Austria during August 2022.The 23 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are covering a wide range from integrative machine learning approach, considering the importance of data science and visualization for the algorithmic pipeline with a strong emphasis on privacy, data protection, safety and security.

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This book analyses the economic consequences of the regional government of Catalonia's challenge to democracy and the rule of law in Spain. This process, started in 2010, culminated in a coup d'état in the autumn of 2017. The book has three parts. First: The circumstances behind the challenge: economic structure, social and political aspects. Second: The economic impacts of the resulting huge political instability and social polarisation, and the downturn in GDP, investment, competitiveness, Barcelona's appeal, and flight of companies and banks to Madrid. Third: Independence would mean collapse of trade with the rest of Spain and the EU, expulsion from the eurozone, fall of GDP, plummeting tax revenue, soaring unemployment and, finally, conversion of this hypothetical new Catalonia into a failed, vassal and totalitarian state. This book is destined to be the foremost work of reference on the consequences of the separatist threat to Spain, including Catalonia's current decline.

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This book provides an overview of Pacific-Indigenous knowledge as insights of Oceanic citizen-science to inform culturally-safe practice for psychology. It profiles contemporary Pacific needs in areas of crisis such as family violence, education disparities and health inequities, and points to ancient Pacific-indigenous knowledges as tools of healing for global diasporic communities in need. The historical evolution of psychology’s knowledge base and practice illustrates a fundamental crisis in the method of producing knowledge for psychology - the absence of Pacific-indigenous cultural knowledge. It suggests more effective research methodologies grounded in Pacific-Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies for psychology and overall community capability. It fosters practice perspectives and strategies based on NIU-psychology (New Indigenous Understandings) for innovative solutions to modern-day crises of humanity.

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This book is about the policy-practice praxis in English language education, and draws on research from a diverse range of under-explored international settings to showcase the importance of contextual realities on how policy and practice interact. The case studies covered in the volume come from five continents (Africa, Europe, Asia, and South and North America) and cover 11 countries in total. The authors cover a wide range of themes and identify a number of issues at the interface between policy and practice. In some cases they also highlight local initiatives for navigating these issues, providing contextually-grounded guidance and experience which will be of use to teachers and teacher trainers in other settings. This book will be of interest to policy makers, EMI researchers, ELT practitioners, teacher trainers and trainees, and the broader Applied Linguistics research community.

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This monograph provides a compact introduction into the classical, i.e. rate-independent, plasticity theory. Starting from the engineering stress-strain diagram, the concept of elastic and elasto-plastic material behavior is introduced, as well as the concept of uniaxial and multiaxial stress states. Continuum mechanical modeling in the elasto-plastic range requires, in regards to the constitutive equation, in addition to the elastic law (e.g. Hooke’s law), a yield condition, a flow rule and a hardening rule. These basic equations are thoroughly introduced and explained for one-dimensional stress states. Considering three-dimensional plasticity, different sets of stress invariants to characterize the stress matrix and the decomposition of the stress matrix in its hydrostatic and deviatoric part are introduced. Furthermore, the concept of the yield condition, flow rule and hardening rule is generalized for multiaxial stress states. Some typical yield conditions are introduced and their graphical representation in different stress spaces is discussed in detail. The book concludes with an introduction in the elasto-plastic finite element simulation of mechanical structures. In the context of numerical approximation methods, the so-called predictor-corrector methods are used to integrate the constitutive equations. This is again introduced in detail based on one-dimensional stress states and afterwards generalized to the three-dimensional case. Test your knowledge with questions and answers about the book in the Springer Nature Flashcards app.

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This book explores the hidden world of sex clubs. These are not strip clubs, lap dancing clubs, or brothels; these are clubs that men and women visit to have no strings attached sex. Each year sex clubs, traditionally called swingers clubs, are visited by over one million people in the UK. Using social and cultural theory, the author explores the cultures of desire through themes such as erotic hierarchies, atmospheres and power, women and sexual fantasies, men, masculinity and non-consent, hypersexualized black bodies, heterosexuality and queer heteroeroticism and trans desires. From cuckolding to group sex, bareback sex to intergenerational sex, partner swapping and threesomes to BDSM and fetish nights, sex clubs host a diverse range of sexual encounters that are part of a growing trend of recreational sex. Despite there being over 40 clubs in the UK alone, we continue to know very little about who is visiting the club, why they go there and what people do. This book—drawing upon ethnographies, interviews and large-scale quantitative data—is one of the first in the field to systematically collect and critically interrogate sex clubs and their erotic encounters. This will not only be the first sustained social and cultural analysis of sex clubs themselves, but it also aims to lure the reader into the club through discussions of ethnographic encounters, enabling them to experience the unique dynamics of sex clubs and their cultures of desire.

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This book is devoted to the construction of space group representations, their tabulation, and illustration of their use. Representation theory of space groups has a wide range of applications in modern physics and chemistry, including studies of electron and phonon spectra, structural and magnetic phase transitions, spectroscopy, neutron scattering, and superconductivity. The book presents a clear and practical method of deducing the matrices of all irreducible representations, including double-valued, and tabulates the matrices of irreducible projective representations for all 32 crystallographic point groups. One obtains the irreducible representations of all 230 space groups by multiplying the matrices presented in these compact and convenient to use tables by easily computed factors. A number of applications to the electronic band structure calculations are illustrated through real-life examples of different crystal structures. The book's content is accessible to both graduate and advanced undergraduate students with elementary knowledge of group theory and is useful to a wide range of experimentalists and theorists in materials and solid-state physics.

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This two-volume set of LNCS 13393 and LNCS 13394 constitutes - in conjunction with the volume LNAI 13395 - the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Computing, ICIC 2022, held in Xi'an, China, in August 2022. The 209 full papers of the three proceedings volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 449 submissions.This year, the conference concentrated mainly on the theories and methodologies as well as the emerging applications of intelligent computing. Its aim was to unify the picture of contemporary intelligent computing techniques as an integral concept that highlights the trends in advanced computational intelligence and bridges theoretical research with applications. Therefore, the theme for this conference was “Advanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications”. Papers focused on this theme were solicited, addressing theories, methodologies, and applications in science and technology.

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Dermatological diseases are extremely common around the globe, and a systematic understanding of these conditions and their relationships with various epidemiological factors could provide insights to help governments and private institutions address the challenges they need to overcome in order to improve global health. This extensively revised second edition comprehensively discusses the fundamental areas of dermatological practice in public health. It features more than 900 figures, eight new chapters and two new sections: a) Dermatological Biopsy and Major Histopathological Patterns, exploring surgical methods for collecting cutaneous specimens from outpatients and the analysis of major histopathological patterns; b) Special Chapters, which outlines Hospital Dermatology in Public Health, covering hospital care as a backup in dermatoses of importance in public health; Dermatological Education in Public Health, examining the interface between teaching and students for the development of dermatological practice; and a Brief History of Dermatology.Further topics include the profile of dermatological care based on epidemiological concepts; the most significant skin diseases (including dermatology in tropical medicine); the relationship between the environment and dermatological diseases; dermatoses in the human life cycles, diseases that are not primarily dermatological, but have a high impact on public health and may have skin and mucosal manifestations; a number of emerging issues in dermatology in public health; clinical approaches (diagnosis and management) to common dermatological symptoms; multidisciplinary approaches in dermatology; surgical and histopathological aspects of the main dermatological diseases; and the hospital as an aid in the management of complex dermatoses and dermatological education in public health. Written by experts with extensive experience in their respective fields, this book is a valuable reference resource for undergraduate and graduate students, dermatologists and general practitioners, as well as anyone interested in the relationship between dermatology and public health.

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, MDAI 2022, held in Sant Cugat, Spain, during August - September 2022.The 16 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers discuss different facets of decision processes in a broad sense and present research in data science, machine learning, data privacy, aggregation functions, human decision-making, graphs and social networks, and recommendation and search. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Decision making and uncertainty; Data privacy; Machine Learning and data science.

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This volume contains the detailed text of the major lectures delivered during the I-CELMECH Training School 2020 held in Milan (Italy). The school aimed to present a contemporary review of recent results in the field of celestial mechanics, with special emphasis on theoretical aspects. The stability of the Solar System, the rotations of celestial bodies and orbit determination, as well as the novel scientific needs raised by the discovery of exoplanetary systems, the management of the space debris problem and the modern space mission design are some of the fundamental problems in the modern developments of celestial mechanics. This book covers different topics, such as Hamiltonian normal forms, the three-body problem, the Euler (or two-centre) problem, conservative and dissipative standard maps and spin-orbit problems, rotational dynamics of extended bodies, Arnold diffusion, orbit determination, space debris, Fast Lyapunov Indicators (FLI), transit orbits and answer to a crucial question, how did Kepler discover his celebrated laws? Thus, the book is a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers in the field of celestial mechanics and aerospace engineering.

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This timely collection of chapters written by international experts bridges the gap between peace psychology and restorative justice. The Editors combined their respective fields of expertise to start a much-needed debate on the potential but also risks that are associated when implementing restorative justice in the peace psychology field. The volume highlights how psychological theory and research can inform and evaluate the potential of restorative practices in formal and informal educational settings as well as the criminal justice space. The chapters cover both negative and positive peace across levels while introducing the reader to various case studies from across the world. All in all, the book explores how restorative justice can promote positive peace through its connection fostering dialogue, empathy, forgiveness, and other key psychological elements of peace.

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This volume builds upon the successful book Lanthanide Luminescence published in the Springer Series on Fluorescence in 2011. Since its publication, the field of lanthanide spectroscopy and the areas in which the light emission properties of the f-elements are used have experienced substantial advances. The luminescence properties of lanthanide ions make them unique candidates for a myriad of optical applications. This book highlights and reviews the latest research in areas ranging from luminescence thermometry to imaging, sensing and photonic applications of these fascinating elements. Each chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to a specific area of application of lanthanide luminescence and extensively reviews seminal papers and current research literature. Given its interdisciplinary scope, the book appeals to scientists and advanced students in physics, chemistry and materials science interested in compounds and materials with optical properties.

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This open access book provides insights into the everyday lives of long-term prisoners in Switzerland who are labelled as ‘dangerous’ and are preventatively held in indefinite, probably lifelong, incarceration. It explores prisoners’ manifold ways of inhabiting the prison which can be used to challenge well established notions about the experience of imprisonment, such as ‘adaptation’, ‘coping’, and ‘resistance’. Drawing on ethnographic data generated in two high-security prisons housing male offenders, this book explores how the various spaces of the prison affect prisoners’ sense of self and experience of time, and how, in particular, the indeterminate nature of their imprisonment affects their perceptions of place and space.It sheds light on prisoners’ subjective, emplaced and embodied perceptions of the prisons' various everyday time-spaces in the cell, at work, and during leisure time, and the forms of agency they express. It provides insight into prisoners’ everyday habits, practices, routines, and rhythms as well as the profoundly existential issues that are engendered, (re)arranged, and anchored in these everyday contexts. It also offers insights into the penal policies, norms, and practices developed and followed by prison authorities and staff.

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This book makes a relevant contribution to a Marxist critical explanation of social conflicts, social movements and protests. There is abundant literature on social conflict and social movements from Marxist perspectives. However, rigorous criticism, both theoretical and methodological, is scarce. The objective of this volume is the collection of works developing a critical reflection on the categories of theories about contentious collective action and social movements from a Marxist perspective. In order to better understand these phenomena and go beyond their mere case description, the theory needs to be improved. To that end, the book also promotes the debate between Marxisms and the collective action and new social movements in a renewed way. Here different Marxist arguments consider not only their methodological and ideological bias, but also the specific conceptual contributions of those theories.

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This open access book examines how families and other social institutions interact to shape outcomes over the life course. It considers how to use research evidence to reduce social disadvantage through translation of evidence to support public policies and programs. The chapters focus on key life course stages such as early child development, adolescence, emerging adulthood, parenting, marriage, relationships and ageing, as well as examining experiences and outcomes for selected social groups such as Indigenous children, migrants and refugees, and gay, lesbian and bisexual groups. The book presents evidence using high-quality and recent data. With a focus on Australia, the volume provides new insights into how context shapes life course pathways and outcomes and a contrast to work that typically focuses on Europe and the United States. It will be of value to anyone interested in understanding how family background and life course pathways influence social disadvantage.

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Knowledge of automata theory and formal languages is crucial for understanding human-computer interaction, as well as for understanding the various processes that take place when manipulating knowledge if that knowledge is, indeed, expressed as sentences written in a suitably formalized language. In particular, it is at the basis of the theory of parsing, which plays an important role in language translation, compiler construction, and knowledge manipulation in general.Presenting basic notions and fundamental results, this concise textbook is structured on the basis of a correspondence that exists between classes of automata and classes of languages. That correspondence is established by the fact that the recognition and the manipulation of sentences in a given class of languages can be done by an automaton in the corresponding class of automata. Four central chapters center on: finite automata and regular languages; pushdown automata and context-free languages; linear bounded automata and context-sensitive languages; and Turing machines and type 0 languages. The book also examines decidable and undecidable problems with emphasis on the case for context-free languages.Topics and features: Provides theorems, examples, and exercises to clarify automata-languages correspondences Presents some fundamental techniques for parsing both regular and context-free languages Classifies subclasses of decidable problems, avoiding focus on the theory of complexity Examines finite-automata minimalization and characterization of their behavior using regular expressions Illustrates how to derive grammars of context-free languages in Chomsky and Greibach normal forms Offers supplementary material on counter machines, stack automata, and abstract language families This highly useful, varied text/reference is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses on automata theory and formal languages, and assumes no prior exposure to these topics nor any training in mathematics or logic.Alberto Pettorossi is professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy.

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This book consists of chapters written by international experts on various aspects of single molecule toroics (SMTs).The chapters cover a broad range of relevant topics and highlight the latest advances performed in the field. An up-to-date overview of the emerging SMT architectures is presented while particular attention is given to not only the magnetism and relaxation effects involved but also to the respective applications in advanced electronics and memory devices. The role that lanthanides play -especially that of dysprosium- is discussed, while a thorough analysis using theoretical/ab initio calculations is provided. Since SMTs have grown out of single molecule magnetism (SMM), it is an expanding and topical subject and the present book will engender excitement and interest amongst chemists, physicists, theoreticians and materials scientists. The volume will be of great interest to researchers and graduates working on this topic and particularly those involved in lanthanide chemistry, magnetism and theory.

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This open access book provides information how to choose and collect the appropriate metrics for a software project in an organization. There are several kinds of metrics, based on the analysis of source code and developed for different programming paradigms such as structured programming and object-oriented programming (OOP). This way, the book follows three main objectives: (i) to identify existing and easily-collectible measures, if possible in the early phases of software development, for predicting and modeling both the traditional attributes of software systems and attributes specifically related to their efficient use of resources, and to create new metrics for such purposes; (ii) to describe ways to collect these measures during the entire lifecycle of a system, using minimally-invasive monitoring of design-time processes, and consolidate them into conceptual frameworks able to support model building by using a variety of approaches, including statistics, data mining and computational intelligence; and (iii) to present models and tools to support design time evolution of systems based on design-time measures and to empirically validate them. The book provides researchers and advanced professionals with methods for understanding the full implications of alternative choices and their relative attractiveness in terms of enhancing system resilience. It also explores the simultaneous use of multiple models that reflect different system interpretations or stakeholder perspectives.

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This book discusses the Versatile Video Coding (VVC), the ISO and ITU state-of-the-art video coding standard. VVC reaches a compression efficiency significantly higher than its predecessor standard (HEVC) and it has a high versatility for efficient use in a broad range of applications and different types of video content, including Ultra-High Definition (UHD), High-Dynamic Range (HDR), screen content, 360º videos, and resolution adaptivity. The authors introduce the novel VVC tools for block partitioning, intra-frame and inter-frames predictions, transforms, quantization, entropy coding, and in-loop filtering. The authors also present some solutions exploring VVC encoding behavior at different levels to accelerate the intra-frame prediction, applying statistical-based heuristics and machine learning (ML) techniques.

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This open access book provides selected teaching approaches, supporting methods, concrete examples of curricula as well as extracurricular teaching formats, which are predominantly tailored to both African and German requirements. These approaches were developed by the YEEES Training and Research Centers, an international interdisciplinary network of university teachers and researchers from Germany and southern Africa, and combine the fields of management, entrepreneurship, information and communication technologies (ICT), and sustainability. The book shows how current scientific results can be integrated into teaching, how students can contribute to research while learning, and how research can contribute to the development and evaluation of new formats. It is thus relevant for university teachers, researchers, students as well as practitioners who want to educate and act as future change agents.

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This book brings together leading authorities from the fields of international human rights law, criminology, legal medicine, and political science with international human rights judges and UN experts to analyze the current situation of detainees in Europe, the Americas and Africa.This comprehensive volume offers a platform for reflecting on the complexity of the prison problem from a multidisciplinary perspective. The authors address detention-related issues with the aim of generating new ideas that contribute to both academic discussion and critical analysis. Academic dialogue across the globe provides insights into various national and international carceral systems and how they deal with human rights behind bars. At the same time, the critical comparison helps to identify basic needs and practices that can work in multiple settings. The contributors are respected experts and leading scholars in their fields, and each has pursued prison and human rights research over the last decades. However, this is the first time that they have come together in a multidisciplinary academic project. This book aims to stimulate diverse actors to imagine alternative ways of engaging with persons deprived of their liberty, in academia and in practice.

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems, FoIKS 2022, held in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2022. The 13 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers address various topics such as information and knowledge systems, including submissions that apply ideas, theories or methods from specific disciplines to information and knowledge systems. Examples of such disciplines are discrete mathematics, logic and algebra, model theory, databases, information theory, complexity theory, algorithmics and computation, statistics and optimization.

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The book presents topical theoretical and experimental studies for developing advanced methods of detecting materials fracture and assessing their structural state using acoustic emission. It introduces new mathematical models characterizing the displacement fields arising from crack-like defects and establishes a new criterion for classifying different types of materials fracture based on specific parameters obtained from wavelet transforms of acoustic emission signals. The book applies this approach to experimental studies in three types of materials—fiber-reinforced composites, dental materials, and hydrogen-embrittled steels.

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This book summarizes the latest studies regarding innovation in urban design and planning. It shares many tips and insights about sustainable solutions for the issues facing transport systems, innovative digital technologies, and ICT trends. The book touches upon the need to integrate the three fields of Architecture, Engineering, and Technology that have become indispensable. This is intended to respond to the increasing human needs and population growth in cities on one hand and to develop a holistic approach that helps overcome challenges to sustainability and environment management on the other hand. With the power of engineering in practice, problems of design and development once considered too complex to be dealt with other than empirically, intuitively, or by trial and error, are now becoming more solvable and applicable. This book offers strategies and solutions that enable designers to bring together knowledge in the fields of architecture, engineering, and technology to overcome challenges facing in modern times.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have transformed many standard and conventional methods in undertaking health and well-being issues of humans. AL/ML-based systems and tools play a critical role in this digital and big data era to address a variety of medical and healthcare problems, improving treatments and quality of care for patients. This edition on AI and ML for healthcare consists of two volumes. The first presents selected AI and ML studies on medical imaging and healthcare data analytics, while the second unveils emerging methodologies and trends in AI and ML for delivering better medical treatments and healthcare services in the future.In this first volume, progresses in AI and ML technologies for medical image, video, and signal processing as well as health information and data analytics are presented. These selected studies offer readers theoretical and practical knowledge and ideas pertaining to recent advances in AI and ML for effective and efficient image and data analytics, leading to state-of-the-art AI and ML technologies for advancing the healthcare sector.

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