Humanities & Social Sciences

Slavic languages

The Hispanic and Anglo worlds are often portrayed as the Cain and Abel of Western culture, antagonistic and alien to each other. This book challenges such view with a new critical conceptual framework – the ‘Hispanic-Anglosphere’ – to open a window into the often surprising interactions of individuals, transnational networks and global communities that, it argues, made of the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) a crucial hub for the global Hispanic world, a launching-pad and a bridge between Spanish Europe, Africa, America and Asia in the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Perhaps not unlike today, that was a time marked by social uncertainty, pandemics, the dislocation of global polities and the rise of radicalisms. The volume offers insights on many themes including trade, the arts, education, language, politics, the press, religion, biodiversity, philanthropy, anti-slavery and imperialism. Established academics and rising stars from different continents and disciplines combined original, primary research with a wide range of secondary sources to produce a rich collection of ten case-studies, 25 biographies and seven samples of interpreted material culture, all presented in an accessible style appealing to scholars, students and the general reader alike.

Das Image der Parole ist ramponiert: Sie vereinfacht, sie agitiert, wird zur Kennzeichnung von Populisten herangezogen. Entsprechend wurde sie in die Schmuddelecke verbannt. Was aber ist eine Parole genau und welche Funktion erfüllt sie in politischen Mobilisierungen? Ausgehend von umfangreichem Archivmaterial, arbeitet Daphne Weber alltägliche mediale Praktiken, Gebrauchsroutinen und Strategiediskussionen um verschiedenste Parolen in ihren historischen Kontexten heraus. Von den erbittert konkurrierenden Parteien der Weimarer Republik über die Massenmobilisierungen der Friedensbewegung in den 1980er Jahren, die Herrschaftspropaganda der SED in der DDR und das Aufbegehren der Friedlichen Revolution 1989 bis hin zu den Protesten rechter Bewegungen heute – überall nimmt die Parole eine unabdingbare mobilisierende und organisierende Funktion ein. Daraus ergibt sich eine Neubewertung: Wer Politik macht, kommt an Parolen nicht vorbei. Statt die Parole als Kampfbegriff zur Diskreditierung des politischen Gegners zu verwenden, muss ihr potenter Charakter als rhetorisches Werkzeug politischer Mobilisierung neu entdeckt werden. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

Grounded in empirically-based country case studies, this new study provides a sober assessment of what decentralisation can achieve. The current momentum for decentralisation of government in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world is unparalleled, but are the benefits claimed by its advocates being realised? Focusing on two claims in particular, this book questions whether decentralisation does offer a significant pathway out of poverty and conflict in Africa. Issues of poverty reduction are addressed in Uganda, Ghana, Malawi and Tanzania, while those of conflict management are explored in Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda and Rwanda.

This article traces the history of water rescue in the Netherlands and the pivotal role of the Apeldoorn Rescue Brigade. Founded in 1934, the brigade gained (inter)national fame with its innovative “Auto te water” course, training people to escape from submerged vehicles. The article explores the evolution of rescue methods – from 18th-century resuscitation experiments to modern lifesaving techniques – and highlights how the brigade’s unique training cabin became a symbol of Dutch safety innovation. Through collaboration with police, fire service, and insurers, the brigade professionalized water rescue and contributed to public safety education. The donated training cabin now preserved by Korpora represents not just a technical artifact, but a legacy of courage, dedication, community service, and prevention.

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash conceived of the Metaverse as an escapist medium within a dystopian future. By the early 2000s, his vision had evolved into a blueprint for pioneering virtual worlds, notably Second Life. In the 2010s, technology companies—from Meta to Epic Games—recast the Metaverse as the next frontier of digital experience and revenue generation. Now, in the 2020s, the still speculative concept encompasses a convergence of extended reality technologies alongside blockchain systems and artificial intelligence. The contributors bring together leading scholars and industry professionals to examine past “imaginations” and recent “achievements” in the pursuit of the Metaverse. They trace its development through literary, media, and cultural history while exploring current applications and their technical, social, cultural, and economic implications.

This open access book presents a unique interdiscplinary analysis of urban projects promoted by the EU from a comparative perspective This book presents cross-sectional and cross-time analyses at the territorial level targeted by these initiatives focusing on the design, theory and impacts of urban projects developed under the framework of initiatives promoted by the European Union. The book includes a new methodology to analyse the design and theory of urban plans (the comparative urban portfolio analysis) and quasi-experimental strategies to perform impact assessment at the neighbourhood level (the territorial target of those initiatives). Although empirical analyses focus on examples in Spain, the resulting analytical and methodological outcomes of these studies can be applied in a broader context to analyse integral urban policies in other countries.

Plants

Taxonomy is the common name for an EU regulation that supports companies in sustainable environmental and climate action (Regulation [EU] No. 2020/852). It is a classification tool designed for investors, companies, and financial institutions to define the environmental impact of business activities and the requirements that organisations must meet to be considered as sustainable. The aim of this book is to examine the EU taxonomy from the built environment perspective and the ways in which it can be used to build resilience in real estate. It presents the issues, hot points, and possible choices from the designers, construction consultants, and investing bodies' points of view, those who must set forth initial conditions, which should later become the keystones for greener developments. It brings together the expertise of a unique team of both researchers and professionals and presents a methodology, case studies, and solutions which together comprise a novel understanding of the taxonomy’s influence on the pre-construction phase. The book: • describes the role of the built environment within sustainable development and how real estate can be used to build resilience with the use of taxonomy. • describes the characteristics of resilient environmentally friendly cities in the future. • proposes a roadmap to demonstrate urban policies that promote decarbonisation; and •enables investors to compare their products, operations, and strategies in terms of sustainability. Overall, this book is essential reading for decision-makers in the public and private sectors, urban developers, space and spatial designers, architects, planners, community stakeholders, and real estate investors. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This open access book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the First International ISCIS Security Workshop 2018, Euro-CYBERSEC 2018, held in London, UK, in February 2018. The 12 full papers presented together with an overview paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. Security of distributed interconnected systems, software systems, and the Internet of Things has become a crucial aspect of the performance of computer systems. The papers deal with these issues, with a specific focus on societally critical systems such as health informatics systems, the Internet of Things, energy systems, digital cities, digital economy, mobile networks, and the underlying physical and network infrastructures.

There is no bigger policy agenda in the East Asian region than connectivity. Costs of international connectivity are indeed falling, in the movement of goods, services, people and data, leading to greater flows, and to the reorganisation of business and the emergence of new forms of international transactions. There are second-round effects on productivity and growth, and on equity and inclusiveness. Participating in trade across borders involves significant set-up costs and, if these costs are lowered due to falling full costs of connectivity, more firms will participate, which is a driver of productivity growth and innovation at the firm level. Connectivity investments are linked to poverty reduction, since they reduce the costs of participating in markets. This volume includes chapters on the consequences of changes in both physical and digital connectivity for trade, for the location of economic activity, for forms of doing business, the growth of e-commerce in particular, and for the delivery of new services, especially in the financial sector. A study of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also included. These studies are preceded by an assessment of the connectivity performance in the Asia-Pacific region and followed by a discussion of impediments to investment in projects that contribute to productivity. The collection as a whole provides the basis for a series of recommendations for regional cooperation. The Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) conference series has been at the forefront of analysing challenges facing the economies of East Asia and the Pacific since its first meeting in Tokyo in January 1968.

Computer science

Das Prinzip "Lernen am Unterschied" betont die Innovationskraft, die sich in Lernprojekten entfaltet, wenn Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven gemeinsam ein Thema erarbeiten. Das 1. Ludwigsburger Symposium Bildungsmanagement 2006 hat diesen Ansatz aufgegriffen, um unterschiedliche Herangehensweisen des Bildungsmanagements für Wissenschaft und Managementpraxis zu erschließen und Wissenschaftler und Praktiker aus Schule, Wirtschaft und Erwachsenenbildung an einen Tisch zu bringen. Der Band steht kostenfrei zum Download unter wbv-open-access.de zur Verfügung.

In recent years, media studies and internet studies have paid increasing attention to the concept of infrastructure, and to the related concept of distribution. In this chapter I discuss some of the benefits for media and internet research brought about by the turns to infrastructure and distribution, notably a welcome concern with the mundanity and ordinariness of existing systems rather than optimistic speculation about future impacts, and an invigorating interest in questions of representation and meaning in relation to often taken-for-granted technologies. But I also discuss some of the problems surrounding the infrastructural turn in media and internet research: a tendency to use the term “infrastructure” in such a variety of ways that it risks losing its analytical value; an uncertain engagement with ideas of materiality and “relationality”; and a tendency towards banality and vagueness (including dubious defenses of vagueness itself). I close by reflecting on how the problems identified seem to have led to a neglect of other traditions of research, such as political economy of media, that might provide insights into the workings of media infrastructures as traditionally understood, but in a call for synthesis, I also point to those other traditions have also failed to pay due attention to the best contributions of recent media infrastructural studies.

In Splinters en Dorings uit die Rosestad se Verlede vertel Hannes Haasbroek van dié stad se kostelikhede en treurmares uit die verre verlede te boek. Die geskiedkundige foto’s is verkry uit die versamelings van die Nasionale Museum, Oliewenhuis-kunsmuseum, Vrystaatse Provinsiale Argiefbewaarplek en die Nasionale Afrikaanse Letterkundige Museum en Navorsingsentrum (NALN) in Bloemfontein.