Humanities & Social Sciences

This edited volume brings together contributions from across disciplines and domains of expertise to offer thoughtful guidance on AI ethics, law, and policy. The “Ethics” section grapples with broad issues facing institutions amid the ongoing march of AI, such as agency, morality, and personhood, and provides frameworks for ethical decision-making. The “Law” section explores current legal considerations and challenges that are emerging as AI forces us to confront issues of ownership, accountability, and culpability. The “Policy” section provides insight into how institutions, corporations, and governments are navigating these challenges to provide workable solutions. Moreover, a final “Domain Applications” section offers case-study-like examples of how these issues are being addressed in real-world situations, with deep, illustrative detail. Across these chapters, diverse voices offer a wealth of philosophical considerations and practical guidance on how we can lead the world more intentionally toward the AI future we want.

The essay outlines the features of an eco-territorialist and patrimonial approach to energy transition, a process that is not taking place with the necessary urgency nor with the desirable consistency with respect to the principles of ecologic-environmental and landscape sustainability. Energy resources, one of the founding components of the urban bioregion, are available in every territory with specific peculiarities; rethinking the energy system in a non-predatory perspective means protecting the reproducibility of such resources and establishing virtuous dynamics creating territorial value added. Energy communities can represent effective tools for the enhancement of local energy heritages still not properly employed, towards a horizon of progressive energy sovereignty of territories.

This book explores how Lean – a global management doctrine – operates and is adopted in the real, corporeal, collective, and affective environments of health and social care services. During Lean implementation processes, knowledges, affects, skills, and materialities come together in manifold, complex ways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and observation, and with empirical and theoretical rigour, the book provides an answer to the question of what happens to care work when processes become ‘Leaned’. As in many other fields, the predominantly female health and social care sectors suffer from devaluation in terms of wages and working conditions. The book explores how Lean management is ultimately lived in this gendered context of work and labour. Moreover, the book situates Lean and related management doctrines in the current mutation of capitalism – that is, biocapitalism – in which bios, life itself, becomes the core of value production. The book adds to the corpus of work, organisation, and management studies on Lean that have rarely focused on gender, affect, or sociomateriality. It provides scholars in Social Science, Management, and Gender Studies with a fresh outlook and a cross-disciplinary take on Lean management.

In der Reihe Slavistische Beiträge werden vor allem slavistische Dissertationen des deutschsprachigen Raums sowie vereinzelt auch amerikanische, englische und russische publiziert. Darüber hinaus stellt die Reihe ein Forum für Sammelbände und Monographien etablierter Wissenschafter/innen dar.

How does the use of ict affect the relationship between government and its citizens? This book analyses the developments of networking information and concludes that in everyday practice an iGovernment has gradually come into existence, overtaking the old paradigm of the eGoverment. The iGoverment, effectively running at full speed on information flows and networks, is however seriously out of step with the self-image of the digital government, and the existing structure and division of responsibilities. This book is based on the report on iGovernment that the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) presented to the Dutch Government in March 2011. "This book contributes powerfully to the understanding and evaluation of the development - beyond 'eGovernment' - of 'information Government', centred on highly complex flows and uses of information for public services, care and control, rather than technology itself. Sound empirical research and a concern to create better governance of iGovernment enable the authors to bring a sharply critical eye to their call for greater awareness by policy-makers, and for a strategic, reasoned and institutionalised relationship among the principles involved. These include ones that are often neglected: privacy, freedom of choice, accountability and transparency. Their recommendations are important, not only for the Netherlands". Charles D. Raab, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh "This book will be a valuable resource for researchers and scholars seeking to understand the possibilities, dilemmas and challenges of bringing the Internet and related technologies to centre stage in government and public services. It offers a fascinating case study of electronic government and 'information government' in the Netherlands, with examples from local, national and eu government, a wide-ranging literature review and a number of recommendations as to how iGovernment should develop". Helen Margetts, Professor of Society and the Internet and director of the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford "Not only does this book offer an insightful analysis of the problems that ongoing digitization poses for citizens and the goverrnment itself (such as creeping loss of data quality), it also places highly valuable markers for the decisions that must be taken on the challenging path that lies ahead for iGovernment, in providing a new model for weighing up the various fundamental interests at stake". Alex Brenninkmeijer, National Ombudsman, The Netherlands

This volume collects the contributions presented at the 14th International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA 2025), held in Florence on December 16 –17, 2025. Since 1999, MAVEBA has been a biennial multidisciplinary forum on the study of the human voice and its biomedical applications. The workshop focuses on quantitative assessment of voice disorders, singing voice parameters, newborn cry analysis, and modelling of vocal fold and vocal tract dynamics, also highlighting advances such as Artificial Intelligence. It brings together researchers and clinicians across bioengineering, otolaryngology, phoniatrics, neurology, speech therapy, linguistics, and related fields, with emphasis on translational research and real-world impact.

Die Arbeit untersucht mögliche Zugangsrouten zu Verfahrensdokumenten der Europäischen Kommission und der schweizerischen Wettbewerbskommission. Kern der Arbeit ist die Frage, ob die Ausgestaltung der Zugangsmöglichkeiten und deren Handhabe seitens der Wettbewerbsbehörden dem Zweck des Kartellschadenersatzes gerecht wird. Um diese Frage zu beantworten, wird der Zweck des Kartellschadenersatzes erörtert. Hiernach werden verschiedene Zugangsrouten erkundet und auf ihre Zweckdienlichkeit hin untersucht. Die Untersuchungsergebnisse bilden sodann Gegenstand legislatorischer Anpassungsvorschläge, die den Zweck des Kartellschadenersatzes gleichermaßen wie das Bedürfnis nach einer wirksamen öffentlichen Durchsetzung berücksichtigen.

This monograph investigates a multitude of emerging technologies including 3D printing, 5G, blockchain, and many more to assess their potential for use to further humanity’s shared goal of sustainable development. Through case studies detailing how these technologies are already being used at companies worldwide, author Sinan Küfeoğlu explores how emerging technologies can be used to enhance progress toward each of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and to guarantee economic growth even in the face of challenges such as climate change. To assemble this book, the author explored the business models of 650 companies in order to demonstrate how innovations can be converted into value to support sustainable development. To ensure practical application, only technologies currently on the market and in use actual companies were investigated. This volume will be of great use to academics, policymakers, innovators at the forefront of green business, and anyone else who is interested in novel and innovative business models and how they could help to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. This is an open access book.

This book forms part of contemporary research on the interaction between migratory early farmers of Anatolian origin and European hunter-gatherers. In southern Eastern Europe, these two ways of life coexisted for thousands of years, resulting in a wide variety of configurations and patterns. Therefore, this part of the prehistory of southern Eastern Europe is of general European importance, providing comparative material for the study of Neolithisation and offering a different perspective to illuminate the possible variants of historical development and better identify the social structures behind the differences.

Are Christians fulfilling the stewardship commandment of Genesis to care for God's household? When we speak of the "environmental crisis" facing the planet, we reduce the coming catastrophe to a physical problem. In Creation in Crisis, Joshtrom Kureethadam seeks to extend the current understanding of what is truly an ecological crisis to include ethical and spiritual perspectives, arguing that the crisis is not merely an environmental problem, but is truly 'eco-logical' (a discourse about our common home - oikos) in nature. In its careful incorporation of the latest science around issues such as environmental degradation, pollution, climate change, and food production, this book also enters into dialogue with various disciplines in understanding the contemporary ecological crisis. Creation in Crisis offers a depth of vision that yields up profound insights about our present milieu and the future of our common home.

Political Science

Hank Nelson was an academic, film-maker, teacher, graduate supervisor and university administrator. His career at The Australian National University (ANU) spanned almost 40 years of notable accomplishment in expanding and deepening our understanding of the history and politics of Papua New Guinea, the experience of Australian soldiers at war, bush schools and much else. This book is a highly readable tribute to him, written by those who knew him well, including his students, and also contains wide-ranging works by Hank himself. –Professor Stewart Firth, ANU.

This book focuses on the important and diverse field of vibration analysis and control. It is written by experts from the international scientific community and covers a wide range of research topics related to design methodologies of passive, semi-active and active vibration control schemes, vehicle suspension systems, vibration control devices, fault detection, finite element analysis and other recent applications and studies of this fascinating field of vibration analysis and control. The book is addressed to researchers and practitioners of this field, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students and other experts and newcomers seeking more information about the state of the art, challenging open problems, innovative solution proposals and new trends and developments in this area.

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility.

The end of the foundation phase of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences with the integration of the previously independent Hamburg University for Economics and Politics (Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Politik, HWP) and the former faculties for social science and economics of the University of Hamburg gave rise to a scientific symposium on higher education governance, with top-class performers. The symposium was aiming at a comparision of different management models, especially from other European countries, confront them and analyze them both from a management perspective and experience based on scientific and analytical points of view and to evaluate them. Particular attention was to the tension between centralization and decentralization relevant for all universities. The presentations are documented in this volume.