Humanities & Social Sciences

The introduction to this volume describes the contribution that it makes to scholarship on ancient divinatory practices. It analyses previous and current research, arguing that while this predominantly functionalist work reveals important socio-political dimensions of divination, it also runs the risk of obscuring from view the very people, ideologies, and experiences that scholars seek to understand. It explains that the essays in this volume focus on re-examining what ancient people—primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures—thought they were doing through divination. The Introduction provides an overview of the content of each chapter and identifies key themes and questions shared across chapters. The volume explores the types of relationships that divination created between mortals and gods, and what this can tell us about the religions and cultures in which divination was practised.

Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world.

Institutional and technological change is a highly topical subject. At the theoretical level, there is much debate in the field of institutional economics about the role of technological change in endogenous growth theory. At a practical policy level, arguments rage about how Japan and the Japanese economy should plan for the future. In this book, leading economists and economic historians of Japan examine a range of key issues concerning institutional and technological change in Japan, rigorously using discipline-based tools of analysis, and drawing important conclusions as to how the process of change in these areas actually works. In applying these ideas to Japan, the writers in this volume are focusing on an issue which is currently being much debated in the country itself, and are helping our understanding of the world’s second-largest economy.

Before new interventions can be used in disease control programmes, it is essential that they are carefully evaluated in “field trials”, which may be complex and expensive undertakings. Descriptions of the detailed procedures and methods used in trials that have been conducted in the past have generally not been published. As a consequence, those planning such trials have few guidelines available and little access to previously accumulated knowledge. In this book the practical issues of trial design and conduct are discussed fully and in sufficient detail for the text to be used as a “toolbox” by field investigators. The toolbox has now been extensively tested through use of the first two editions and this third edition is a comprehensive revision, incorporating the many developments that have taken place with respect to trials since 1996 and involving more than 30 contributors. Most of the chapters have been extensively revised and 7 new chapters have been added.

Dual language bilingual programs aim to develop bilingualism, biliteracy, and sociocultural competence while meeting grade-level academic standards. There are at least four dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program models, which are traditionally defined by the student groups they imagine serving. One of these groups is transnational and racialized language learners who are, more often than not, otherwise marginalized in US schools. Well-implemented DLBE programs, with their roots in the historical and political fight for civil and educational rights for children who speak languages other than English, have been shown to be demonstrably effective for this group. Unfortunately, not all programs are well implemented, and they exist in spaces with colonial and racist histories, as pointed out by Guadalupe Valdés’s cautionary note decades ago. Even when DLBE programs are designed specifically for racialized and transnational language learners, research has documented persistent challenges to equity.

Russlands Krieg gegen die Ukraine, Pandemie, Klimawandel und Extremwetterereignisse: Immer neue Krisen erschüttern die Gesellschaften weltweit. Zugleich steigt die Zahl der Gewaltkonflikte, an denen häufig nichtstaatliche, irreguläre Milizen und Rebellen beteiligt sind. Das Friedensgutachten 2023 zeigt auf, welche Handlungsspielräume die deutsche Politik nach der »Zeitenwende« in der Friedens- und Sicherheitspolitik hat. Zentrale Themen sind die Erhöhung der Widerstandsfähigkeit im Globalen Süden angesichts multipler Krisen sowie die Entwicklung eines Ansatzes, Rüstungskontrolle neu zu denken und gegen Desinformationen zu schützen. Ebenso im Fokus stehen die kluge Gestaltung des Handels mit unbequemen Partnern, die Förderung von kooperativen Beziehungen und der Kampf gegen die Polarisierung demokratischer Gesellschaften. Mit seinen konkreten Handlungsempfehlungen für Bundestag und Bundesregierung ist das Friedensgutachten ein zentrales Medium für den Dialog zwischen Wissenschaft, Gesellschaft und Politik. Die deutschen Friedensforschungsinstitute (BICC/HSFK/IFSH/INEF) geben das Gutachten seit 1987 heraus.

Gait analysis is important for the investigation of gait progression and the development of therapies in disorders characterized by gait impairments, such as Parkinson's disease (PD), Huntington disease (HD), and Spinal Cord Injury (SCI). Describing gait quantitatively helps researchers to analyze gait impairment in a more consistent, reliable, and precise manner compared to qualitative description. For this reason, apparatus and computation methods are continuously developed for both clinical and preclinical studies using animals. One of the gait analysis apparatus for rodents is called CatWalk. The system is equipped with a transparent glass floor walkway, where rodents can walk from one to the opposite end. Using a camera located under the walkway, the system records a video, which contains the information of the paw contact positions. Based on the recorded video, this CatWalk system computes several gait parameters. Here, several computational methods that enrich the information extracted from CatWalk data are presented. These methods improve the outcome of the current Catwalk data acquisition by providing methods in identifying gait patterns related to PD, providing a silhouette-length-based intra-assay scaling method, an initial data analysis method, and a parametric gait recovery progression score for rat SCI models.

This book contributes to an extensive number of scholarly works produced in 2017 which commemorate the scientific revolution and paradigm shift that occurred in 1517. The year 2017 marks the 500th celebration of the Reformation actuated by Martin Luther when he published what later became known as the Ninety-Five Theses on indulgences. The Reformation was a religious, social, cultural and political event that reshaped the landscape of modern Europe and has had an influence on parts of the world far beyond. This includes the ‘far South’ such as South Africa where the legacy of the Reformers has moulded institutional and individual lives across boundaries of ethnicity and beliefs. Worldwide celebrations of this quincentenary anniversary provide scholars with an opportunity to reflect anew on the consequences and lasting import of the Reformation. This book provides one such a platform by discussing the scientific relevance of Reformed theology, specifically with regard to biblical, historical and systematic-theological themes. Comprising a collection of essays by scholars belonging to the Reformed tradition, it aims at examining the historical heritage of the Reformation, the current state of discourse in Reformed theology as well as the contemporary relevance of a Reformed approach to theology. It contains biblical, historical-theological and systematic-theological perspectives and addresses a variety of issues such as biblical interpretation, text-criticism, translation, constructive impulses emanating from classical Reformed thought, Christian freedom, anthropology and dialogue with non-Reformed traditions. Although the approaches followed are by no means exhaustive, they do provide the reader with some indication of approaches followed in Reformed discourse. Chapters 1–4 pertain to biblical interpretation. A variety of methods are discussed and employed, namely the grammatical-historical, text-immanent, socio-historical, redactional-historical, diachronic and synchronic approaches. These analyses confirm that biblical interpretation requires a multi-faceted approach to biblical texts. Chapters 5–9, conversely, discuss various historical and systematic-theological themes. Classical texts from the Reformation, specifically works by Calvin and Luther, are examined, and contemporary theological literature are analysed, compared and evaluated while innovative new ideas are proposed. This book is written in the reformed spirit of semper Reformanda. While it enters into dialogue with other traditions such as Pentecostal, Neo-Pentecostal, Roman Catholic and Lutheran theology, it also exhibits an attitude of self-reflection and self-correction. This contribution does not only affirm the Reformed heritage as a living tradition, but it also attempts to invigorate the tradition with innovating new ideas by drawing on classical and recent theological literature. The target audience is mainly Reformed theologians, but non- Reformed scholars, who are interested in engaging with the Reformed tradition, would find this book informative.

This book is open access under a CCBY license. This book investigates child poverty from a philosophical perspective. It identifies the injustices of child poverty, relates them to the well-being of children, and discusses who has a moral responsibility to secure social justice for children.

While the literature on “new institutionalism” explains the stability of institutional arrangements within countries and the divergence of paths of institutional development between countries, Federico Ferrara takes a “historical institutionalist” approach to theorize dynamic processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change in explaining the development of political institutions. Ferrara synthesizes “power-based” or “power-distributional” explanations and “ideas-based” “legitimation explanations.” He specifies the psychological “microfoundations” of processes of institutional development, drawing heavily from the findings of experimental psychology to ensure that the explanation is grounded in clear and realistic assumptions regarding human motivation, cognition, and behavior. Aside from being of interest to scholars and graduate students in political science and other social-scientific disciplines whose research concentrates on the genesis of political institutions, their evolution over time, and their impact on the stability of political order and the quality of governance, the book will be required reading in graduate courses and seminars in comparative politics where the study of institutions and their development ranks among the subfield’s most important subjects.

Besides the environmental benefits, electric powertrains offer the potential to improve braking performance by exploiting the fast response of the electric motor. A particularly challenging control task for such systems is braking at the limit of the tire adhesion, which must optimally handle the actuation redundancy of the hybrid braking system in addition to coping with the high system uncertainties and the time varying dynamics of the tire-road contact. The proposed and experimentally validated control framework seeks to optimize the tradeoff between maximizing energy recuperation and optimizing braking dynamics, in the form of wheel torque tracking during normal braking and wheel slip tracking when braking at the limit of the tire adhesion. Conventional solutions such as daisy chain and cascaded control structures provide only suboptimal results due to under-utilization of the actuation dynamics. Therefore, this work proposes a centralized (i.e., ’single-loop’) brake control strategy, where the wheel-slip regulation, torque tracking and torque blending are jointly addressed via the model predictive control framework. Model predictive control is able to account for the effects of system constraints using online optimization, which enables the actuation redundancy of the hybrid brake system to be optimally handled. However, conventional model predictive control approaches for uncertain linear parameter varying systems, such as wheel slip control under time-varying velocity, are either too computationally intensive or do not offer stability guarantees. Spurred by these shortcomings, this work extends existing robust model predictive control design methods to offer feasibility and stability guarantees for linear parameter varying systems with a modest increase in the computational burden. The proposed approach exploits the fact that physical systems represented as linear parameter varying systems usually have a limited rate of change of the scheduling parameter. Consequently, a robust model predictive control formulation is developed that incorporates those parameter rate constraints and constraint tightening methods to reduce its conservatism. The proposed method provides robust stability guarantees for linear parameter varying systems. Finally, its application to the hybrid braking control at the tire-road friction limits concludes this work.

This anthology deals with current research on Norwegian educational history. The nine articles build on presentations from a conference – organized in Drammen by the University of South East Norway in April 2023 – about Norwegian educational history, which is an area of research that has developed significantly during the last decade. New networks have been founded, academic positions on educational history have been imposed on Norwegian universities, and several anthologies and monographies have been published. Accordingly, this book is a fruitful result of this rehabilitation of Norwegian educational history. The anthology authors mainly come from Norwegian academic research milieus, but some Swedish and Danish scholars also write texts in the book. Generally, the anthology – which mainly focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries – manifests how schools and education always reflect the surrounding society and its dominating ideologies and structures, for example concerning how the implementation reform pedagogy is connected to the process of democratization; how school disciplines, in various ways, are affected by changing civic norms and ideas; how national and Scandinavian ideologies have influenced textbooks; how the development of the Nordic welfare state system decided different types of psychological and pedagogical categorizations of children; how new epistemological approaches in the academic world impact educational policy and curriculum; and on how changes in the Norwegian school system should be interpreted in an international context.;Internasjonalt har det utdanningshistoriske feltet endret seg og vokst de siste tiårene. I samme periode har skole- og pedagogisk idéhistorie i Norge mistet sin tradisjonelle posisjon innen pedagogikk og lærerutdanning. De siste årene har derimot utdanningshistoriske tema blitt løftet innen samfunnsvitenskap, humaniora og ulike skolefag. De ni artiklene i denne antologien gir eksempler fra dagens utdanningshistoriske perspektiv og forskning. Som samlet verk viser dette feltets dybde, bredde og relevans for skole og samfunn. Bokens ni artikler bygger på foredrag fra den første norske utdanningshistoriske konferansen arrangert i april 2023. I Drammen møttes drøyt 70 norske og skandinaviske forskere med utdanningshistorie som felles interesse og fokus. Konferansen ble arrangert av ”Nettverk for norsk utdanningshistorie”, dannet i 2022 etter nordisk og særlig svensk inspirasjon. Nettverk for norsk utdanningshistorie, den første konferansen og dette verket befester og gir løfte om en ny norsk utdanningshistorie. Vi setter punktum for den første konferansen og ser fram til neste i Bergen 2026. Artiklene viser hvordan skole og utdanning historisk speiler samfunnet og utvikling over tid. Vi får innblikk i koblinger mellom reformpedagogikk og demokratisering, mellom en tids samfunns- og borgerideal og skolefagenes innhold. Lenge påvirket nasjonsbygging og nasjonal identitet lærebøker, slik læremidler i kunnskapsløftenes tid preges av menneskerettigheter og demokrati. Vi ser også hvordan velferdsstatens politiske og pedagogiske prosjekt legitimerte psykologisk sortering og kategorisering av barn, og dveler ved forhold mellom bevaringspolitikk, kildetilgang og kunnskapshistorie. Over tid har ulike ambisjoner, vitensfelt og kunnskapssyn slått inn og preget elevens og skolens verden. Artiklene viser hvordan norsk pedagogikk, skole og utdanningsfelt samtidig er preget av særnasjonal tradisjon og internasjonale ideer fram mot vår tids «usamtidighet». Kunnskap om de historiske linjene er nødvendig for å gi morgendagen retning. Skole og utdanning er i sin natur framtidsrettet. Utdanningshistorie gir pedagogisk kart og kompass.

»Hast du so etwas schon mal gesehen – so eine Mischung?!« Die Frauen, die in dieser sozial- und kulturanthropologischen Studie zu Wort kommen, rufen mit einem koreanischen und einem nicht-koreanischen Elternteil zahlreiche Gefühle – von Faszination bis Verachtung – in ihrer Umwelt hervor. Welche Affekte löst dies bei den so multi-rassifizierten Frauen aus? Wessen Gefühle gelten in rassistischen Gesellschaften als legitim? Durch eine affekttheoretische Rassismuskritik offenbart Alexandra Bauer diffus erspürte und daher äußerst effektive Re-Produktionsformen von »Rasse« im Alltag. Thematisiert wird das Ringen der Frauen mit hiesigen Gefühlsordnungen zwischen affektivem Orientierungsverlust, dem Hinterfragen von Herrschaftsverhältnissen bis hin zu Heilungsprozessen.

This book on the legacy of Albert Schweitzer contextualises this remarkable intellectualist, humanist, medicine-man, theologian and Nobel Prize winner. This collected work is aimed at specialists in the humanities, social sciences, education, and religious studies. The authors embrace philanthropic values to benefit Africa and the world at large. The publication engages with peers on the relevance of Schweitzer’s work for humanitarian values in Africa. The essays in the book stimulate further research in the various fields in which Schweitzer excelled. Its academic contribution is its focus on the post-colonial discourse in contemporary discussions both in South Africa and Africa at large. The book emphasises Schweitzer’s reverence for life philosophy and demonstrates how this impacts on moral values. However, the book also points to the possibility that Schweitzer’s reverence for life philosophy is embedded in a typically European appreciation of ‘mysticism’ that is not commensurate with African indigenous religious values. From an African academic perspective, the book advocates the view that Schweitzer’s concept of the reverence for life supports not only the Biblical notion of imago Dei but also the African humanist values of the preservation and protection of life, criticising the exploitation of the environment by warring factions and large companies, especially in oil-producing African countries. It also argues that Schweitzer’s disposition on ethics was influenced by the Second World War, his sentiments against nuclear weapons and his resistance to the Enlightenment view of ‘civilisation’. With regard to Jesus studies the book elucidates values promoted by Schweitzer by following in Jesus’ steps and portraying Jesus’ message within a modern world view. Taken over from Schweitzer, the book argues that Jesus’ moral authority resides in his display of love and his interaction with the poor and marginalised. The book demonstrates Schweitzer’s understanding of Jesus as the one who sacrifices his own life to bring the Kingdom of God to realisation in this world. The book commends Schweitzer’s insight that we know Jesus through his toils on the one hand, and through our own experiences on the other. It is in a mixture between the two that the hermeneutical gap between then and now is bridged. It is precisely in bridging this gap that Schweitzer sees himself as an instrument of God’s healing. It defines Schweitzer as the embodiment of being a healer, educationalist and herald of the greening of Christianity. His philosophy on the reverence for life prepares a foundation for Christians to think ‘green’ about human life within a greater environment. He advocates aspects of education such as lifelong learning, holistic education and a problem-based approach to education. Finally, the book analyses both critically and appreciatively Albert Schweitzer’s contribution to the concepts of religious healing prevalent in African Christianity today.

The delivery of essential goods to beneficiaries in the aftermath of a disaster is one of the main objectives of relief logistics. Thereby, the present work aims to improve relief logistics by improving the location selection of warehouses, distribution centers, and points of distribution. Consequently, it offers the potential to significantly improve the distribution of goods in the aftermath of future disasters and, thereby, increase disaster resilience.