Humanities & Social Sciences

How has the world lost three quarters of its crop diversity in less than a century? How does a collection of seeds frozen in the Arctic help face this loss and ensure future food security? And how can Indigenous knowledges and artistic interventions inspire modes of dealing with agrobiodiversity loss that respond to contemporary socio-ecological transformations with care rather than techno-salvationism? Franziska von Verschuer traces these questions from the world's stronghold against agrobiodiversity loss, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to divergent worlds and modes of world-making it assembles along with seeds. This study shows that the future is more open than the popular story of the ›doomsday vault‹ suggests.

Federalism as a mode of governance has been a popular response to most conflicts which stemmed from ethnic/language/religious mobilisation. However, the track record of resolving communal or identity conflicts has not always been good, the least of all in Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan. Why the lack of success? Is the federal solution inherently inappropriate for communal accommodation by exacerbating the problem? If not inevitably or inherently inappropriate, is it then a question of poor design? Or is it merely ineffectual implementation of the ‘federal solution’? The chapter argues that federal arrangements in Africa have been the last measure to hold countries together; therefore federalism per se cannot blamed for persistent conflicts. Whether federalism is able to address communal conflicts depends much on constitutional designs dealing with both ethnic issues and federal concepts in general. Where federal solutions have been tried, it is highly centralised, and even then often superficially and reluctantly implemented. To judge the efficacy of federal arrangements in constitutions they first must be implemented. This depends again on a broader embrace of constitutionalism; democracy, separation of powers, limited government, and the rule of law have to become part of political/legal culture of a country.

Der eigentliche Inhalt des Werkes wird indessen den Leser hier und da näher an die Antworten heranführen, die er aber eher 'zwischen den Zeilen' als im reinen Wortlaut suchen muß, denn diese Arbeit ist in der Hauptsache literaturhistorisch ausgerichtet. Es handelt sich um folgende Themen: 1) Die Bedeutung der Dichtung für das lesende Publikum in der UdSSR; 2) Die Tradition der jüngeren russischen Dichtung in der UdSSR; 3) Die Entwicklung der sowjetischen Nachkriegsdichtung; 4) Das Spezifische der Nachkriegsdichtung in der UdSSR im Vergleich zur tschechischen Dichtung: 5) Das Spezifische der tschechischen Rezeption der russischen Nachkriegsdichtung

Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to induce Italy’s surrender. Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro. The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

There is rising demand for automated digital twin construction based on point cloud scans, especially in the domain of industrial facilities. Yet, current automation approaches focus almost exclusively on geometric modelling. The output of these methods is a disjoint cluster of individual elements, while element relationships are ignored. This research demonstrates the feasibility of adopting Graph Neural Networks (GNN) for automated detection of connectivity relationships between elements in industrial facility scans. We propose a novel method which represents elements and relationships as graph nodes and edges respectively. Element geometry is encoded into graph node features. This allows relationship inference to be modelled as a graph link prediction task. We thereby demonstrate that connectivity relationships can be learned from existing design files, without requiring domain specific, hand-coded rules, or manual annotations. Preliminary results show that our method performs successfully on a synthetic point cloud testset generated from design files with a 0.64 F1 score. We further demonstrate that the method adapts to occluded real-world scans. The method can be further extended with the introduction of more descriptive node features. Additionally, we present tools for relationship annotation and visualisation to aid relationship detection

Taking a global perspective to the computer age reveals how work, gender, and emotions have shaped its history. Since the 1960s, workplaces have been key sites for the introduction of computers, transforming organizations, future imaginaries, and perceptions of self and others. Yet, contrary to dominant narratives, this process was neither smooth nor universally welcomed. Workers and organizations responded in diverse ways, forming distinct emotional communities amid profound change. Across eight chapters, case studies from Europe, Asia, and Latin America offer new insights into the global computer age and invite reflection on our present relationship with technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and ongoing workplace transformations.

This edited volume is centered on the production, discussion, and consumption of contemporary art in the post-Yugoslav space now. Authors in this volume demonstrate how and why contemporary art discourses have continued to overcome chronic difficulties in local cultural economies since the dissolution of the common federal space of socialist Yugoslavia. This book focuses on socialist Yugoslavia’s prevailing cultural legacies of anti-fascism, non-alignment, queer and feminist movements, and socially engaged art, which inform and shape contemporary critiques of neoliberal capitalist conditions in the arts. Chapters are rooted in ongoing global challenges in contemporary art: a universal exhaustion through over-work (on the part of the artist/art worker) and over-stimulation (the audience); the structural weakness of contemporary art as a set of institutional activities; and the instrumentalization of art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, gender studies, Slavic studies, politics, and post-conflict studies.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the phenomenology of heavy flavour physics, those working on the B-factories, LHCb, BTeV, HERA and the Tevatron. It explains how heavy quark theory could be implemented on the lattice, and discusses the status of CP-violation in the neutral kaon system.

Teaching Health Care in Virtual Space is the first “how-to” manual for health educators on the instructional use of three-dimensional, computer-generated virtual environments, called “multi-user virtual learning environments” or MUVE. Dr. Estelle Codier has written a step-by-step handbook based on her experience supervising more than 400 learning activities in Second Life®. The book provides specific steps to assess instructional readiness and guidance for assessing student and class readiness. The text is accompanied by lively case studies of student learning illustrate the power of MUVE to transform health care education. The text includes an appendix of evaluation grids, grading matrices, syllabus descriptions, and detailed orientation materials for both faculty and students. While the sample learning activities were designed for nurses, instructors in other disciplines could easily adapt them for use in any MUVE setting.

For the first time, this book presents the complete collection of Greek inscriptions of Gebel el-Silsila East – Ancient Egypt’s largest and most important sandstone quarry, including lists of names and professions of individuals involved in the quarry expeditions. The inscriptions are described, illustrated and analysed and placed within their archaeological context based on careful documentation in situ with up-to-date methodology. The work makes substantial contributions in the form of novel and improved readings and interpretations of known texts and of the new publication of texts discovered through the fieldwork. It is the first volume of three dealing with Graeco-Roman inscriptions on the east bank, with the following two volumes to cover the demotic texts and quarry marks respectively.

This open access book is the first comprehensive guideline for the beryllium-7 (Be-7) technique that can be applied to evaluate short-term patterns and budgets of soil redistribution in agricultural landscapes. While covering the fundamental and basic concepts of the approach, this book distinguishes itself from other publications by offering step-by-step instructions on how to use this isotopic technique effectively. It covers experimental design considerations and clear instruction is given on data processing. As accurate laboratory measurement is crucial to ensure successful use of Be-7 to investigate soil erosion, a full chapter is devoted to its specific determination by gamma spectrometry. This open access contribution further describes new developments in the Be-7 technique and includes a concluding chapter highlighting its potential benefits to support the implementation of area-wide soil conservation policy.

This edited volume of chapters resulted from an international conference held at the University of Adelaide in July 2016 under the same title to explore the multifaceted concept of ʿilm in Islam — its agency and manifestations in the connected realms of science, religion, and the arts. The aim is to explore the Islamic civilisational responses to major shifts in the concept of ‘knowledge’ that took place in the post-mediaeval period, and especially within the context of the ‘early modern’. It asserts that the true value of knowledge lies in its cross-civilisational reach, as when the development of knowledge in pre-modern Islam exerted profound changes onto the Europeans, whose resurgence in the early modern period has in turn forced massive changes onto the Islamic worldview and its systems of knowledge. Now the landscape of knowledge has significantly changed, the Muslim mind, which has been historically calibrated to be particularly sensitive towards knowledge, can and should open to new horizons of knowing where science, religion, and art can meet again on freshly cultivated and intellectually fertile grounds.

This book aims to trace the different directions that Russia has taken after initiating its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The authors, coming from positions of policy, academia, and practice, employ a transdisciplinary approach to critically engage the question of how Russia as an actor will develop in such an altered paradigm through three lines of argumentation. The first of these themes is centred on Russia’s relations with other major powers and how these ligatures might condition future developments in a global perspective. The second topic relates the effect of the ‘Russian idea’ on domestic dynamics within Russia, as well as with how it has coloured understandings of Russia in the West. Finally, the authors discuss possible future weaknesses for Russia and question whether they will actually be as serious as previously thought. While no singular to the guiding answer can be posited, these dialogues nonetheless contribute to building a solid foundation for discussions within and between transatlantic capitals as well as globally.

The essays of this volume are mainly lectures given at the international conference held at the Center for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religion at the University of Salzburg on the occasion of Raimon Panikkars 100th birthday. They look at the life and thought of this outstanding pioneer of interreligious dialogue – already by descendancy rooted in two cultures and religions (Europe and Asia, Christianity and Hinduism) - not only from theological, philosophical, religious studies and spiritual perspectives, but also from a biographical-personal view and investigate into the relevance and inspiration of his life and works for today.

The volume contains the transcription of the reports presented at the International Conference held in Florence on 14th and 15th June 2012: there are 15 original essays, written (upon request) by authoritative scholars of various Italian and foreign universities, on the important contributions made by their papyrus finds over more than a century to the knowledge of the lost works by Aeschylus and Sophocles, as well as on the value of the papyri for the constitution of the text of their preserved tragedies. The essays are equally divided between Aeschylus and Sophocles, and touch on all the major questions which the study of papyrology has raised for the philological and literary research on the two great tragedy writers. Both for the prestige of the authors and for the variety of the topics addressed, the volume offers an interesting and authoritative picture of the 'state of the art' of the studies in this regard, in light of the interrelationships between papyrology and Greek literature.