Humanities & Social Sciences

Modelling as Research Methodology is written for the scientist and student researching the (expected) functioning of systems under specified conditions. As such, it represents an introduction to the use of modelling in natural, human and economical sciences. The book is divided into two sections. The first section illustrates the universal nature of modelling as aid to the researcher. In the second section, several typical examples of modelling are described.

The „Flecken Adelebsen“ at the edge of the „Solling“ in southern Lower-Saxony looks back to 300 years of jewish history. In 19th century it was named “Little Jerusalem” because of the high number of jewish habitants. Today only the jewish graveyard has outlived. The aim of this documentation is to tap this “House of Living” as a new historical resource and do a part of an outstanding and necessary mourning work.

This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of humanity – both in the sense that they are narrow in what they compare, and that they set a low bar for satisfaction. The book argues that we cannot understand humanitarian governance if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: As a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a material apparatus, and as a set of standards. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from its emergence in the 1960s right through to the present day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for “evidence-based humanitarianism.” Finally, the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs has played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on field research on Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014–2016. This important historical inquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers with an interest in international history and development.

This is an open access book. The aim of this book is to provide a thorough grounding in rainfall-induced landslides from three aspects: the coupling effect of hydraulic and mechanic; the analytical, numerical, and physical simulation methods, and the controlling factors underlying the problem of rainfall-induced landslides. The improved numerical methods, nonlinear, and linear iterative methods which can be used to address the related unsaturated infiltration problems are also presented. This book is an essential reading for researchers and graduate students who are interested in rainfall infiltration, landslides, slope stability, and geohazards in fields of civil engineering, engineering geology, and earth science. The book is written to guide professional engineers and practitioners in slope engineering and geohazard management. This book can enhance their understanding of rainfall-induced landslides, help them analyze a specific problem, prevent landslides, and design engineering slopes according to the local soil and climate conditions.

Contested Terrain provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive and innovative approach to critically analysing the multidimensional and contested nature of security narratives, justified by different ideological, political, cultural and economic rationales. This is important in a complex and ever-changing situation involving a dynamic interplay between local, regional and global factors. Security narratives are constructed in multiple ways and are used to frame our responses to the challenges and threats to our sense of safety, wellbeing, identity and survival but how the narratives are constructed is a matter of intellectual and political contestation. Using three case studies from the Pacific (Fiji, Tonga and Solomon Islands), Contested Terrain shows the different security challenges facing each country, which result from their unique historical, political and socio-cultural circumstances. Contrary to the view that the Pacific is a generic entity with common security issues, this book argues for more localised and nuanced approaches to security framing and analysis.

The catalogue contains manuscript descriptions of smaller collections from the county of Salzburg, especially those, held at Salzburg City Archive (Archiv der Stadt Salzburg), Salzburg District Archive (Salzburger Landesarchiv), Archive of the Archdiocese Salzburg (Archiv der Erzdiözese Salzburg), Salzburg Museum Library (Bibliothek des Salzburg Museums) as well as those held at the Library and the Archive of Mattsee Monastery. The catalogue continues a list of previous publications that make major collections of German medieval manuscripts in Salzburg accessible, such as the catalogue of German manuscripts of St. Peter, the University Library and the Latin manuscripts from Michaelbeuern Monastery.

The rules by which anatomical size and shape are generated have intrigued scientists for centuries. In 1638, Galileo suggested a mathematical relationship between proportional changes in the shape of bones as animals increase in size, which he argued was a functional necessity for weight bearing (1914). The formalism of Galileo, whereby, physical forces and mathematical laws became integrated with studies of size and shape in biology, was most conspicuously encapsulated over a hundred years ago in the 1917 monumental tome by D’Arcy Thompson entitled, On Growth and Form (Thompson 1917). In a breathtakingly comprehensive manner, Thompson synthesized the observations of numerous predecessors and contemporaries, and through countless examples built a theoretical and experimental framework for describing changes in morphology that persists to this day (Stern and Emlen 1999; Arthur 2006).

This open-access book is an interdisciplinary and transnational study of how screen media can shape our perception of Roman women and project present gender inequalities onto them. Maria Wyke and Monika Wozniak explore a range of representations that have given life to Roman women through a multisensory experience of history as image, movement and sound, starting from the 1900s through to the 2020s (from the arrival of cinema to the ascendance of video games). This book asks: what sources do screen media draw on for their Roman women (given the scarcity of suitable ancient material), how are they assembled aesthetically and ideologically using the specific devices of such media (from camerawork to gameplay), and who are they made by and for (especially in terms of gender)? Each chapter investigates the diverse ways these representations interlock with the social position of women at the time in which they were made, and consider to what extent they have responded to the emergence of feminism, the revisionist scholarship on ancient women that emerged in the mid-1970s, and the rise of the #MeToo movement from 2006. The challenge of creating authentic yet compelling portrayals of Roman women is greater than ever, in a media culture marked by anti-feminist rhetoric and a wide gap between our ancient sources (where female agency is tightly constrained) and current expectations for powerful women in popular culture. The volume will therefore provide a stronger platform on which to build the Roman women of the future. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com . Open access was funded by University College London.

Poor construction quality is one of the most significant challenges for the construction industry. However, failures can be avoided or minimized by inspections based on detailed quality inspection plans as a part of quality assurance. Therefore, structured and project-specific planning of inspection plans is required to provide inspectors with the right information. Nevertheless, inspection planning is mainly manual, dependent on the individual’s experience and high level of effort. As a result, inspection planning is often neglected and limited to providing general checklists that often lack semantically rich descriptions and are unspecific concerning individual project requirements. Furthermore, proper planning of inspections requires multiple information sources, such as building design, schedules, contractual and supplier guidelines, and standards, all of which must be provided or linked via an information model. Current research lacks an adequate formalized knowledge model to provide the knowledge-driven inspection planning process with the necessary domain knowledge to support inspection planning with heterogeneous information defined in isolated systems. Therefore, this paper extends the Ontology for Construction Quality Assurance (OCQA) with the OCQA-Thermal Insulation (OCQA-TI) to formalize thermal insulation inspection planning knowledge. The OCQA offers a new linked data model that provides explicit knowledge of quality inspection planning. The development of the OCQA-TI follows the Linked Open Terms (LOT) methodology and is implemented using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The proposed ontology is evaluated using various approaches, including automatic consistency checking, answering competency questions, and criteria-based evaluation. The results indicate that the OCQA-TI can provide inspectors with relevant inspection planning knowledge and integrate various related information streams, thus providing a more comprehensive and efficient approach to insulation inspection planning. The functionality of OCQA-TI enables the fulfillment of increased sustainability and energy efficiency requirements by providing insulation inspection knowledge

The volume investigates the management of the “time” factor in the context of constitutional justice from the point of view of the modulation of the effects over time of the declaration of unconstitutionality and the technique of referral to the legislature. The analysis is intertwined with the study of the German experience of incompatibility decisions, which allow the German Federal Constitutional Court to declare only the incompatibility of a rule and, at the same time, to order the legislature to intervene to remove the constitutional defect. An in-depth study of this type of decision allows us to highlight some important aspects on the governance of the effects of the declaration of unconstitutionality and on the decision-making technique of unconstitutionality envisaged in Italian constitutional justice.

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.

Approaching the subject from a diachronic perspective, the essay sets out to outline a chronology of the Mediterranean prominence in the sugar trade considering port activity and commercial elites. Studies carried out so far, backed by important findings sourced from custom records and private correspondence, attest Genoa’s undisputed leadership during the central decades of the eighteenth century, when Brazilian sugar production grew at exponential rates turning this trade into one of the greatest “businesses” of the time.

Originally written in 1964, this famous text is a study of the classical theory of charged particles. Many applications treat electrons as point particles. At the same time, there is a widespread belief that the theory of point particles is beset with various difficulties such as an infinite electrostatic self-energy, a rather doubtful equation of motion which admits physically meaningless solutions, violation of causality and others. The classical theory of charged particles has been largely ignored and has been left in an incomplete state since the discovery of quantum mechanics. Despite the great efforts of men such as Lorentz, Abraham, Poincaré, and Dirac, it is usually regarded as a “lost cause”. But thanks to progress made just a few years ago, the author is able to resolve the various problems and to complete this unfinished theory successfully. /remove

This history makes use of anti-social theory to take a broad and multifaceted look at queer-feminist punk—from its origins in the 1980s to its contemporary influences on the Occupy movement and Pussy Riot activism.

Groundbreaking material-visual history and ethnography of German–Rapanui entanglements. This book traces German-Rapanui entanglements from past to present through encounters between scholars, missionaries, institutions and Indigenous actors, and through the material and visual traces—objects, photographs, and texts—that continue to shape knowledge and memory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Moving beyond limiting Eurocentric frames, it highlights how Rapanui people have actively engaged with German and German-speaking individuals and institutions to (re)shape different practices and discourses of ‘Rapanuiness’. The chapters bring these dynamics to life: from Bavarian Capuchin activities that reached far beyond conversion, to collecting and exhibiting networks linking Altötting in Bavaria to Rapa Nui; from German efforts to record oral traditions and the 1957 German–Chilean expedition, to long-term archaeological collaborations at Ava Ranga Uka A Toroke Hau . Written by scholars based in Rapa Nui, Germany, Chile, France, and the United States, the volume shows how Rapanui communities have shifted from being marginalised in the management of their heritage to becoming key agents in its interpretation and future. Together, these studies illuminate three centuries of entanglement—and their powerful resonance today.