Open Access Books

Understanding the history of energy and the evolving place of energy in society is essential to facing the changing future of energy production. Across North and South America, national and localized understandings of energy as a common, public, or market good have influenced the development of energy industries. Energy in the Americas brings the diverse energy histories of North and South American nations into dialogue with one another, presenting an integrated hemispheric framework for understanding the historical constructions of contemporary debates on the role of energy in society. Rejecting pat truisms, this collection historicizes the experiences of producers and policymakers and assesses the interplay between environmental, technological, political, and ideological influences within and between countries and continents. Breaking down assumptions about the evolution of national energy histories, Energy in the Americas broadens and opens the conversation. De-emphasizing the traditional focus on national peculiarities, it favours an international, integrated approach that brings together the work of established and emerging scholars. This is an essential step in understanding the circumstances that have created current energy policy and practice, and the historical narratives that underpin how energy production is conceptualized and understood.

Eine der Ursachen für die ungenaue Bestimmung von Service-Levels in IT-Dienstleistungsvereinbarungen liegt in der informellen Repräsentation von IT-Dienstleistungsprozessen. In der Arbeit wird eine integrierte Methode entwickelt, mit der Dienstanbieter verschiedene Qualitätsmerkmale von IT-Dienstleistungen und die zu ihrer Erbringung benötigten IT-Dienstleistungsprozesse modellieren und simulieren können.

The book (' The Energy Needs Of Humanity Through Time: From The Industrial Revolution To Type I Civilization') is about global consumption of energy and its impact on our planet. Energy demand is a quite dynamic phenomenon and depends heavily on technological development, which is particularly evident during industrial revolutions, which had improved the quality of life for the inhabitants, but lead to increase in energy consumption. However~the economic progress did not account for tangible physical limits of our planet, which manifested in rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and a rapid increase in average annual global temperature. The consequences of this type of behavior are clear – future global warming, rising sea levels and direct threat to vast, low-lying areas, as well as a rapid increase in the number and consequences of extreme weather events such as storms, prolonged rainfall, and the like. A path toward less energy intense future requires rapid reductions of fossil fuels usage but also a radical shift towards larger energy efficiency. The book is intended as a source of key data showing how we have arrived at the current state of energy consumption and understanding of climate change.

From a critical and interdisciplinary perspective, this book mobilises the concepts of discourse, framing, and Europeanisation to analyse the dominant narratives about the European Union (EU) in Portugal, and how these are discursively constructed and negotiated. Focusing on media representations, this study uses their triangulation with the vision of political and media elites and public opinion, showing that the debate on Portugal’s integration into the EU and its “Europeanisation” is essentially characterised by pragmatic perspectives, formulated in terms of advantages and disadvantages, and populated by centre/periphery conceptions. The book concludes that a dualism exists across the three discursive spheres analysed: despite the dynamics of peripheralisation still being evident in the country, representations of the EU merge with a national ambition and interest in belonging to the “centre of progress,” echoing and validating what the book paraphrases as a “pragmatic imagination of the centre”.

This book focuses on the potential of agroforestry to maximize agriculture production while minimizing negative effects on the environment. It collects several studies on agroforestry systems from around the world, including a variety of types of agroforestry systems, from traditional wood-pastures to tropical cocoa-based systems, and research approaches, from literature reviews to state-of-the-art ecological-economic models. The book highlights the potential of agroforestry as a promising approach for the creation of multifunctional landscapes able to face contemporary environmental challenges.

The article is devoted to the perception of the guardian angel – a creature existing in the linguistic awareness of Poles and Russians. Due to a number of functions, the content of the collocation of “guardian angel” evolves. The purpose of the research is to compare the linguistic picture of guardian angel from both the traditional and contemporary perspectives. The analysis is based on the description and commentary concerning sample usages of selected lexemes in sentences. The research material has been excerpted from dictionaries and national corpora of both languages. Findings of the conducted analyses indicate a significant similarity in the perception of the idea of guardian angel in the Polish and Russian image of the world. Limits of metaphorisation determine possibilities of modifying the content of the lexemes; thus, they are considered open and broad.

This volume explores how understanding relates to conscious experience. In doing so, it builds bridges between different philosophical disciplines and provides a metaphysically robust characterization of understanding, both in and beyond science. The past two decades have witnessed growing interest from epistemologists, philosophers of science, philosophers of mind and ethicists in the nature and value of intellectual understanding. This volume features original essays on understanding and the phenomenal experiences that underlie it. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part 1 provides theoretical characterizations of understanding, including Henk de Regt’s defense of a contextual theory of scientific understanding and a debate on whether scientific inference and explanatory power are necessary or central features of understanding. Part 2 explores how conscious experience and understanding are related. The chapters articulate a phenomenal theory of understanding and address themes that are connected to understanding, including awareness, transformative experiences and exemplification. Finally, Part 3 is devoted to domain-specific inquiries about understanding, such as logical proofs, particle physics and moral understanding. Understanding and Conscious Experience will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics and phenomenology.

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

Gastrointestinal malignancies represent a healthcare concern worldwide. In recent decades, several innovations in gastrointestinal endoscopy have radically changed approaches to digestive neoplasms. As a result, many preneoplastic or neoplastic lesions of the digestive tract are now amenable to endoscopic resection through innovative techniques, avoiding the need for surgery. These techniques include endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR), endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD), endoscopic full-thickness resection (EFTR), and others. Moreover, endoscopy has several applications in the palliative treatment of gastrointestinal cancers that are unfit for curative therapies. In addition, for cancers susceptible to population screening, such as colorectal cancer, endoscopy has a crucial role in screening and surveillance, contributing to the reduction in cancer incidence and mortality all over the world. Finally, beyond luminal endoscopy, retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) and endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) play a crucial role in the approach to biliopancreatic neoplasms. All these application areas place endoscopy in a leading role in the prevention, diagnosis, management, and follow-up of many gastrointestinal malignancies. This Special Issue aims to summarize all the main applications of endoscopy for digestive neoplasms, as well as the evidence from the literature supporting the effectiveness and safety of the main endoscopic techniques for the curative or palliative treatment of gastrointestinal cancers.

More Nights Than Days is a unique exploration of the experience of children who survived the Holocaust-including Roma and Sinti victims-and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Children are among the principal victims of armed conflicts and slaughters; nonetheless, they perceive events through the prism of their unique perspective and have a range of coping techniques adults don't possess. This overview of writings of ninety-one child survivors bears evidence from a wide range of human ruthlessness. The author presents little-known texts along with famous memoirs and autobiographical fiction, with abundant quotations. Many of these are not only compelling as historical testimony, but poetic and stirringly expressive. Yudit Kiss has not written a historical study or literary criticism of the children's books. She explores, instead, what the authors went through and what they felt and understood about their experience. An accessible and captivating reading, this volume presents a close-up, human size dimension of the destruction. The books written by child survivors also describe the resources and means that helped them to remain human even in the deepest well of inhumanity, offering precious lessons about resistance and resilience.M

This chapter considers Afro-centric anglophone literature on law and technology to decipher dominant themes and approaches. Our scoping study demonstrated a rich and growing body of work on a broad range of topics including privacy in health and biometric data, data governance, the regulation and impact of Artificial Intelligence and other 4IR technologies as well as technology and gender, democracy and human rights. This richness or depth is due to the literature’s grounding in Africa's political, socio-economic context and developmental imperatives. Consequently, there is a strong thematic focus on development, social justice and human rights as well as neo-colonialism and decoloniality with emphasis on feminist perspectives. From which ever perspective scholars take, their shared bottom line is that regulation of technology needs to be carefully nuanced for African contexts to ensure that historical extractive patterns are severed and that legal frameworks do not exacerbate inequality or deepen the digital divide.

The GDPR affects us all: from tech companies to hospitals and universities. But what does it mean from a legal perspective, and where are its boundaries? Bart van der Sloot makes European data protection law clear and accessible. He discusses the core elements of the legislation, its underlying principles, and the interpretation provided by courts and supervisory authorities. The book covers organisational obligations and citizens’ rights, such as access to and erasure of personal data, and offers an overview of relevant case law and enforcement practices. It offers a practical guide for anyone who truly wants to understand the GDPR.

The millimeter-wave frequency band (30–300 GHz) is considered a potential candidate to host very high data rate communications. First used for high capacity radio links and then for broadband indoor wireless networks, the interest in this frequency band has increased as it is proposed to accommodate future 5G mobile communication systems. The large bandwidth available will enable a number of new uses for 5G. In addition, due to the large propagation attenuation, this frequency band may provide some additional advantages regarding frequency reuse and communication security. However, a number of issues have to be addressed to make mm-wave communications viable. This book collects a number of contributions that present solutions to these challenges.

This book presents comprehensive information on arthropods, the most abundant and diverse group of invertebrate animals in existence today. Chapters cover such topics as arthropods as food for humans, arthropods as a bioindicator species, use of arthropods in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries, arthropods and their conservation status, diets for raising arthropods, and much more. It is a useful reference for undergraduate and graduate students, academics, researchers, and anyone interested in learning more about this important group of invertebrates and their current conservation status.

Język francuski jest postrzegany jako trudny ze względu na różnice występujące pomiędzy wymową a pisownią. Słyszymy [boku], a widzimy beaucoup. Piszemy femme, a czytamy [fam]. Systematyczne prześledzenie reguł przejścia od języka mówionego do języka pisanego pozwala jednak dostrzec, że istnieją ścisłe relacje między głoskami języka francuskiego a literami, czy grupami liter, których używamy do ich zapisu. Optymalne opanowanie systemu fonetycznego języka obcego oraz jego systemu ortograficznego sprzyja efektywnej komunikacji w mowie i piśmie. Warto więc sięgnąć po tę książkę i przekonać się, że uczenie się relacji fonogramicznych może być tak samo przyjemne, jak rozwiązywanie krzyżówek. Publikacja zawiera przystępny opis funkcjonowania podsystemów fonicznego i ortograficznego we współczesnej francuszczyźnie. Autor proponuje także konkretne rozwiązania metodyczne ułatwiające nauczanie oraz uczenie się fonetyki i ortografii języka obcego.