Humanities & Social Sciences

The sudden shift to remote education in response to the COVID-19 pandemic created both a unique challenge and a unique opportunity. Students and instructors alike were required to quickly adapt to the digital classroom, adjusting methods, material, and pedagogical approaches on the fly. Bringing together twenty-five interviews from the frontline of emergency remote education, Voices from the Digital Classroom portrays the struggles, innovations, and resilience of students, instructors, and educational professionals in the face of COVID-19. These interviews offer a unique, of-the-moment perspective on an exceptional time. Complemented by additional voices that expand on stories told to reflect on challenges, successes, and lessons learned,Voices from the Digital Classroom is both a time-capsule and a vision for the future. It provides new insights into pandemic teaching and learning, a remarkable lens into the daily realities of the digital classroom, and an inspiration for the future of remote education in a post-pandemic world.

Whether it’s childhood make-believe, the theater, sports, or even market speculation, play is one of humanity’s seemingly purest activities: a form of entertainment and leisure and a chance to explore the world and its possibilities in an imagined environment or construct. But as Roberte Hamayon shows in this book, play has implications that go even further than that. Exploring play’s many dimensions, she offers an insightful look at why play has become so ubiquitous across human cultures. Hamayon explores facets of play such as learning, interaction, emotion, strategy, luck, and belief, and she emphasizes the crucial ambiguity between fiction and reality that is at the heart of play as a phenomenon. Revealing how consistent and coherent play is, she ultimately shows it as a unique modality of action that serves an invaluable role in the human experience.

This book provides an overview of recent developments and applications of the Land Use Scanner model. Internationally recognized as among the best of its kind, this versatile model can be applied at a national level for trend extrapolation, scenario studies and optimization, yet can also be employed in a smaller-scale regional context. Alongside these practical examples from the Netherlands, readers will find discussion of more theoretical aspects of land-use models as well as an assessment of various studies that aim to develop the Land-Use Scanner model further. Spanning the divide between the abstractions of land-use modelling and the imperatives of policy making, this is a cutting-edge account of the way in which the Land-Use Scanner approach is able to interrogate a spectrum of issues that range from climate change to transportation efficiency. Aimed at planners, researchers and policy makers who need to stay abreast of the latest advances in land-use modelling techniques in the context of planning practice, the book guides the reader through the applications supported by current instrumentation. It affords the opportunity for a wide readership to benefit from the extensive and acknowledged expertise of Dutch planners, who have originated a host of much-used models.

This open access book is based on the conference organised by Accademia dei Lincei and the US National Academy of Sciences and supported by the Italian Ministero degli Affari Esteri. It was attended by about 60 scientists and researchers from 13 countries, including, besides Europe, Iran, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Japan, Russian Federation and the USA. In an international scenario shaken by the uncertainties of the pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine, dialogue and scientific collaboration are confirmed to be precious tools to enhance nuclear safety, security and non-proliferation. The urgency to open peace discussions in Ukraine was emphasised by all participants, and the belief that science can make an essential contribution to peace construction was reaffirmed. Current challenges (some new, such as autonomous weapons and the use of artificial intelligence for war purposes) are discussed and attempts made to identify possible solutions and future improvements, including in the field of sustainable energy development.

This book is a review of the basic problems associated with the implementation of bioeconomic processes. The book contains chapters developed by teams from different countries of the world and therefore the chapters correspond to the degree of advancement of the areas within the bioeconomy in these countries. In selected areas, basic concepts and selected technological processes that create this area of the economy to ensure sustainable development have been characterized.

Sustainable Development

The concept of tax compliance is as old as the tax itself, but staying compliant with tax regulations has become increasingly demanding. A changing tax regulatory environment, resulting from regulatory actions of the OECD, the European Union and national governments, poses many problems for tax compliance awareness. This book explores various approaches to improving tax compliance. Starting with the procedures and processes that are at the centre of the debate, it includes the level of tax position security obtained as a result of cooperation between tax administration and an organisation, ending with tax compliance requirements imposed by one-sided action of tax administration. Offering an experience and evidence-based analysis of how tax compliance influences an organisation’s tax and financial position, the issues are examined from both a theoretical and a practical perspective, using empirical research and case studies with an international dimension for illustration. Emphasising a holistic approach to tax compliance and its role in tax risk management within an organisation, this study offers a framework for making the challenging task of tax compliance and risk management more effective and more efficient. Exploring tax compliance focusing on the tax world after the BEPS project and anti-tax evasion and anti-tax avoidance regulatory actions undertaken by the European Union and OECD, the book has a practical focus on tax system design within the organisation and will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners working in the areas of tax law and tax compliance.

One of the most basic questions for any legal system is that of methodology: how one interprets, analyzes, weighs and applies a mass of often competing legal rules, precedents, practices, customs, and traditions to reach final determinations and practical guidance about the correct legal-prescribed course of action in any given situation. Questions of legal methodology raise not only practical concerns, but theoretical and philosophical ones as well. We expect law to be more than the arbitrary result of a given decision maker’s personal preferences, and so we demand that legal methodologies to be principled as well as practical. These issues are especially acute in religious legal systems, where the stakes are raised by concerns for respecting not just human, but divine law. Despite this, the major scholars and codifiers of halakhah, or Jewish law, have only rarely explicated their own methods for reaching principled legal decisions. This book explains the major jurisprudential factors driving the halakhic jurisprudence of Rabbi Yehiel Mikhel Epstein, twentieth century author of the Arukh Hashulchan—the most comprehensive, seminal, and original modern restatement of Jewish law since Maimonides. Reasoning inductively from a broad review of hundreds of rulings from the Orach Chaim section of the Arukh Hashulchan, the book teases out and explicates ten core principles of halakhic decision-making that animate Rabbi Epstein’s halakhic decision-making. Along the way, it compares the Arukh Hashulchan methodology to that of the Mishna Berura. This book will help any reader understand important methodological issues in both Jewish and general jurisprudence.

Government policy; Social conditions; Aboriginal australians

Information Storage and Retrieval; Innovation/Technology Management; Computer Applications; Computers and Society; Big data

In diesem Buch untersuchen Soziolog*innen und Umfrageforscher*innen erstmals systematisch in zehn fundierten Beiträgen die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Corona-Krise in Österreich. Datengrundlage des Sammelbandes, dessen Beiträge frei zum Download zur Verfügung stehen, sind mehrere Umfrageprojekte, die teils in mehreren Erhebungswellen über die Krisenzeit durchgeführt haben. Die Beiträge im Buch fokussieren primär auf die Zeit des ersten Lockdowns in Österreich und diskutieren – basierend auf den empirischen Befunden – die Folgen der Corona-Krise auf verschiedene Bereiche des Lebens. ; In diesem Buch untersuchen Soziolog*innen und Umfrageforscher*innen erstmals systematisch in zehn fundierten Beiträgen die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Corona-Krise in Österreich. Datengrundlage des Sammelbandes, dessen Beiträge frei zum Download zur Verfügung stehen, sind mehrere Umfrageprojekte, die teils in mehreren Erhebungswellen über die Krisenzeit durchgeführt haben. Die Beiträge im Buch fokussieren primär auf die Zeit des ersten Lockdowns in Österreich und diskutieren – basierend auf den empirischen Befunden – die Folgen der Corona-Krise auf verschiedene Bereiche des Lebens.

The teaching work has been questioned by the demands for justice and dignity raised throughout the plurinational territory; who in the midst of exhausting work days, where the pressure for the results in standardized tests, the de-professionalization and the lack of autonomy are constant subjects of discomfort, overwhelm and precariousness, have assumed positions of denunciation with respect to the violations to the rights human beings, they have had to respond and resist the accusations of the conservative sectors of society that have accused them of wanting to “politicize” or “ideologize” the education of the new generations; The pandemic and the confinement policies have abruptly and overwhelmingly installed remote education (in synchronous and asynchronous formats), the use of platforms and computer supports previously unknown or unrelated to teachers, enormous problems of inequality in access to devices technology and internet connection networks, which has further increased the social gaps between students at different levels of the educational system.

Kingdom of Nokia tells a fascinating story of corporatism in Finland. How did the mobile phone giant Nokia make the Finnish elite willing to serve the interests of the company? Nokia became a global player in mobile communications in the 1990s, and helped establish Anglo-Saxon capitalism in Finland. Through its success and strong lobbying, the company managed to capture the attention of Finnish politicians, civil servants, and journalists nationwide. With concrete detailed examples, Kingdom of Nokia illustrates how Nokia organised lavishing trips to journalists and paid direct campaign funding to politicians to establish its role at the core of Finnish decision-making. As a result, the company influenced important political decisions such as joining the European Union and adopting the euro, and further, Nokia even drafted its own law to serve its special interests. All this in a country considered one of the least corrupt in the world.

Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became the object of geopolitical rivalries, state planning, media coverage, popular fascination, and social conflict. In need of rubber, a vital war material, the United States spent millions of dollars to revive the Amazon's rubber trade. In the name of development and national security, Brazilian officials implemented public programs to engineer the hinterland's transformation. Migrants from Brazil's drought-stricken Northeast flocked to the Amazon in search of work. In defense of traditional ways of life, longtime Amazon residents sought to temper outside intervention. Garfield's environmental history offers an integrated analysis of the struggles among distinct social groups over resources and power in the Amazon, as well as the repercussions of those wartime conflicts in the decades to come. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.