Open Access Books

This volume explores and elucidates critical ancient world studies (CAWS), a new model for the study of the ancient world operating critically, setting itself against a long history of a discipline formulated to naturalise a hierarchical, white supremacist origin story for an imagined modern West. CAWS is a methodology for the study of antiquity that shifts away from the assumptions and approaches of the discipline known as classical studies and/or classics. Although it seeks to reckon with the discipline’s colonial history, it is not simply the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern narratives in a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and powerful. Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives, and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of classics. The contributions in this book, by an international group of researchers, offer a variety of situated, embodied perspectives on the question of how to imagine a more critical discipline, rather than a unified single view. The volume is divided into four parts – “Critical Epistemologies”, “Critical Philologies”, “Critical Time and Critical Space”, and “Critical Approaches” – and uses these as spaces to propose disciplinary transformation. Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics is a must-read for scholars and practitioners teaching in the field of classical studies, and the breadth of examples also makes it an invaluable resource for anyone working on the ancient world, or on confronting Eurocentrism, within other disciplines.

Point of Attack argues that the time has come to replace the international rules of war. Current law permits nations to resort to force only in self-defense or under UN authority, which perversely allows mass civilian killings, civil wars, weapons proliferation, and terrorism to run rampant. A new approach should allow the great powers to intervene when a war would benefit global welfare more than the costs.

This book, Paraffin - Thermal Energy Storage Applications, includes 6 chapters that focus on thermal energy storage. It examines the preparation of paraffin via encapsulation to develop a nonconventional energy storage material.

Several steps need to be considered in the management of disasters and emergencies. Establishing command and control, with leaders having communication skills, enables sufficient collaboration and engagement with other agencies and offers the opportunity for situational assessments of the incident as well as the ability to achieve a balance between available personnel and material resources and the need for successful management of the incident. Although these steps are necessary for the overall management of the incident, the medical part remains critical at the operational level. The triage, treatment, and transport of patients are vital steps in the management of the victims and influence the overall outcome of an incident. It is, therefore, critical to establish guidelines regarding how victims are triaged, treated, and transported to specialized medical facilities. These are vital parameters in a multiagency approach to disasters and major incidents, in which several organizations with diverse backgrounds, knowledge, limitations, and abilities need to work together. The aim of this issue is to bring researchers and practitioners together to discuss and describe issues and solutions regarding the evidence-based management of victims of disasters and major incidents, with a particular focus on triage, treatment, and transportation. Special consideration should be given to CBRNE events and their influence on the assessment and management of victims.

This book presents an interdisciplinary approach drawing from the fields of computer science, economics, and law to realize dynamic and flexible Web service markets. It thereby addresses technical issues such as the functional and non-functional description of Web services, economic questions like selecting the right service at an acceptable price, and legal problems dealing with automated contract conclusion and interpretation.

Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism proposes a new critical theory concerning the functioning of capitalism and how we consider knowledge and information. This ambitious book systematically and lucidly introduces contemporary phenomena into the framework of cognitive materialism to address some of the great themes of the social sciences: knowledge, exploitation and social class in an account of capitalismâ s totality in the present day. Author Mariano Zukerfeld reinvigorates materialist study of communications, presenting a typology of knowledge to explain the underlying material forms of information, intellectual property and cognitive work in contemporary societies. Using current examples the book also examines concerns such as free labour and the pivotal role of intellectual property. The book offers nothing less than an introduction to the theory of cognitive materialism and an account of the entirety of the digital (or knowledge) capitalism of our time.

Robustly maintaining balance on two legs is an important challenge for humanoid robots. The work presented in this book represents a contribution to this area. It investigates efficient methods for the decision-making from internal sensors about whether and where to step, several improvements to efficient whole-body postural balancing methods, and proposes and evaluates a novel method for efficient recovery step generation, leveraging human examples and simulation-based reinforcement learning.

Les crises écologiques, les politiques pour les contrer, la croissance des inégalités résultant de la mondialisation et des politiques libérales ont revitalisé la notion de justice environnementale. Cette notion veut comprendre les interrelations entre les inégalités sociales et l'environnement : quel environnement, où, et pour qui ? Des chercheurs se sont emparé de ce concept d'origine nord-américaine, alors peu connu dans le champ académique français, pour jeter un regard neuf et critique s...

Malgré les réticences maintes fois répétées d’Alain Grandbois à l’égard de l’écriture épistolaire, sa correspondance permet de découvrir l’homme par-delà la légende. On y retrace la genèse de son œuvre et des aspects inédits de sa vie mouvementée. Le regard qu’il porte sur son époque et sur ses contemporains par le biais de ses lettres témoigne de ses préoccupations profondes tout autant que de son attitude à l’égard de la société.

A fast-growing legal system and economy in medieval and early modern Rome saw a rapid increase in the need for written documents. Brokers of Public Trust examines the emergence of the modern notarial profession—free market scribes responsible for producing original legal documents and their copies.Notarial acts often go unnoticed, but they are essential to understanding the history of writing practices and attitudes toward official documentation. Based on new archival research, Brokers of Public Trust focuses on the government officials, notaries, and consumers who regulated, wrote, and purchased notarial documents in Rome between the 14th and 18th centuries. Historian Laurie Nussdorfer chronicles the training of professional notaries and the construction of public archives, explaining why notarial documents exist, who made them, and how they came to be regarded as authoritative evidence. In doing so, Nussdorfer describes a profession of crucial importance to the people and government of the time, as well as to scholars who turn to notarial documents as invaluable and irreplaceable historical sources. This magisterial new work brings fresh insight into the essential functions of early modern Roman society and the development of the modern state.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share via Elgaronline, thanks to generous funding support from the Yale Law School, in collaboration with the Transnational Law Center at the University of Tokyo and the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore. This book explores the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism around the world. Contributing authors evaluate typologies of revolutionary, elitist and establishmentarian constitutional orders to answer the question: what does it mean for a constitution to be borne out of a revolution?

Genitourinary cancers are diseases affecting an increasing number of people, the diagnosis and treatment of which are currently undergoing fast and sometimes dramatic changes due to the current landscape of suboptimal management of these diseases. A characteristic feature of urological cancer treatment is the significant heterogeneity of patients (including different stages of local advancement, different locations of metastases, the heterogeneity of pathological findings, etc.). Therefore, in modern urologic oncology, there remains the unmet need of predicting the response to modern treatments, and new diagnostic methods, including but not limited to point-of-care diagnostics, represent a challenge to current guidelines and require verification. Additionally, further development awaits as far as sufficient neoadjuvant and adjuvant treatment in the perioperative setting are concerned. However, recent advancements in systematic treatment, i.e., immunotherapy, have shed light on new treatment paradigms to be implemented in various clinical scenarios, including localized disease, and recent progress in minimally invasive surgical techniques has lead to revisions to the treatment of many urological tumors.

Im Rahmen des Projekts Duncker & Humblot reprints heben wir Schätze aus dem Programm der ersten rund 150 Jahre unserer Verlagsgeschichte, von der Gründung 1798 bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs 1945. Lange vergriffene Klassiker und Fundstücke aus den Bereichen Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Geschichte, Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaft werden nach langer Zeit wieder verfügbar gemacht – und zwar sowohl gedruckt als auch in elektronischer Form. Einige Titel sind bereits erschienen. Täglich kommen weitere hinzu. Bis Ende des Jahres wird das »Duncker & Humblot reprints«-Programm auf ca. 1.500 Bände anwachsen. Möchten Sie regelmäßig über Neuerscheinungen aus dem reprints-Programm informiert werden? Dann abonnieren Sie unseren E-Mail-Benachrichtigungsdienst.

This work examines the practice of reading aloud in the interactional context of adult participants engaging in an interface-mediated collaborative game activity. With a conversation analytic approach onto video data of user studies, empirical cases of reading aloud are presented. It is shown how participants multimodally co-organise reading aloud in-interaction for providing accessibility to game text in a game that is unfamiliar to them. With reading aloud, participants meet the interactional challenge of making game text audibly accessible that is not always visually accessible for all participant alike. This practice is not only conducted for another but with another in a truly joint fashion, working as a continuer to accomplish the unfamiliar game.