Open Access Books

This open access book seeks to provide a survey of historical, geopolitical, economic, and environmental developments in the last 150 years and to highlight future challenges it faces as it pertains to the areas mentioned earlier. It argues that the centrality of the canal—geo-strategically and otherwise—requires a shift in scholarly focus to study the various aspects from an interdisciplinary perspective. This book addresses several gaps in the literature—the first being a lack of a systematic examination of historical aspects in the development of the canal in 150 years. The second is a careful study of the canal’s geostrategic importance. The third is a combination of several disciplines that examine the centrality of the Suez Canal.

In southern Central Europe, the Alps represent both barriers and communication spaces. Across these topographical, natural boundaries, archaeological find situations repeatedly provide numerous evidences of transalpine mobility, whose development in the course of prehistoric epochs is recognisable in various forms of interactions and networks. The accompanying visible transformation processes in the archaeological find material can be considered under the question of socio-cultural and socio-economic connections between settlement communities. The focus of the study area is on the Alpine Rhine Valley and the neighbouring inner Alpine valley landscapes as well as the regions at the exit of the traverse with their high density of prehistoric settlement sites. The aim of this study is a diachronic synthesis from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in order to develop models of mobility and networks on the basis of selected sites in the central Alpine region, which are characterised by the diversity of the ceramic find material and its stylistic changes.

Mind, State and Society examines reforms in psychiatry and mental health care in Britain during 1960–2010 and their relation to society. A truly multidisciplinary account, it will appeal to psychiatrists, mental health professionals, policymakers, social scientists, historians and activists. It is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Winner of the Montreal Jewish Public Library's J. I. Segal PrizeOriginally published in 1991. In the eighteenth century, more than half of the world's Jewish population lived in Polish private villages and towns owned by magnate-aristocrats. Furthermore, roughly half of Poland's entire urban population was Jewish. Thus, the study of Jews in private Polish towns is central to both Jewish history and to the history of Poland-Lithuania. The Jews in a Polish Private Town seeks to investigate the social, economic, and political history of Jews in Opatów, a private Polish town, in the context of an increasing power and influence of private towns at the expense of the Polish crown and gentry in the eighteenth century. Hundert recovers an important community from historical obscurity by providing a balanced perspective on the Jewish experience in the Polish Commonwealth and by describing the special dimensions of Jewish life in a private town.

Religion’s place in American public life has never been fixed. As new communities have arrived, as old traditions have fractured and reformed, as cultural norms have been shaped by shifting economic structures and the advance of science, and as new faith traditions have expanded the range of religious confessions within America’s religious landscape, the claims posited by religious faiths—and the respect such claims may demand—have been subjects of near-constant change. In The Limits of Religious Tolerance, Alan Jay Levinovitz pushes against the widely held (and often unexamined) notion that unbounded tolerance must and should be accorded to claims forwarded on the basis of religious belief in a society increasingly characterized by religious pluralism. Pressing at the distinction between tolerance and respect, Levinovitz seeks to offer a set of guideposts by which a democratic society could identify and observe a set of limits beyond which religiously grounded claims may legitimately be denied the expectation of unqualified non-interference.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of antenna arrays and their applications in wireless communication systems. It presents modern studies of reconfigurable antenna arrays, radar antenna arrays, radiation pattern analysis, and optimization and coverage determination for antenna arrays. It also explores current methods of antenna array design, characterization, and evolution.

Based on the findings of the college learning environment research project, this book includes a range of articles on the future of colleges focusing on organization, didactics, digital structures and physical learning or teaching spaces. In the future, a critical task will be establishing colleges as unified or integrated learning environments.

L’enquête Pratiques culturelles des Français, réalisée depuis 1973 par le ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, mesure les taux de pénétration, au sein de la population française, des principales formes d’accès à la culture. Comparer des données d’enquêtes sociologiques produites depuis trente-cinq ans à intervalle d’une décennie environ requiert plusieurs précautions méthodologiques à mettre en œuvre pour l’analyse des données. Il convient de tenir compte des évolutions structurelles de la société aux plans démographique, économique et social et de distinguer les effets d’époque, de génération et d’offre. Ensuite, les pratiques culturelles elles-mêmes, et plus généralement les modes d’accès à la culture se sont transformés depuis trente-cinq ans, notamment sous l’effet des innovations technologiques. Enfin, le document revient sur l’interprétation des processus souvent convoqués pour analyser l’évolution des pratiques culturelles : féminisation, élitisation ou démocratisation, juvénilisation.

An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity.

Published

The different sciences furnish us with a wide variety of explanations: some work at macroscopic scales, some work at microscopic scales, and some operate across different levels. How do these different explanatory levels relate to one another, and what is an explanatory level in the first place? Over the last fifty years, more and more philosophers—both reductionists and anti-reductionists—have no longer subscribed to the idea that the best explanation resides at the fundamental physical level. New challenges arise from the success of scientific explanations employing multi-level models which mix levels of explanation, from distinctive differences between levels structures in biology, cognitive science and social science, from the apparently radical reimagining of the explanatory role of spacetime in our current best theories of fundamental physics, and from the enduring mystery of how higher-level explanations are possible in the first place. These questions naturally connect to classic philosophical ways of thinking about the relations between levels: reduction, emergence and fundamentality. This volume presents a snapshot of cutting-edge research on explanatory levels, from their conceptual foundations to the details of how they are used in scientific practice.

The increasing use of genetic diagnostic methods enables ever more precise, personalized medicine. At the same time, it leads to the collection of genetic data that may also contain information relevant to third parties. Such methods are also now routinely used in transplantation medicine. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether physicians are permitted or even required to disclose the genetic data of deceased organ or tissue donors to their relatives. This thesis addresses this regulatory gap. Following a discussion of the scientific foundations, it analyzes the current legal framework, identifies the existing need for legislative action and develops a practice-oriented regulatory proposal

This book is about solders and their composition and focuses on material characterizations and the methods used to make alloys and determine their structures, physical properties and applications. Physical properties and the factors that control them and theoretical verification are the main contents of this book. Corrosion of solders is included in the coverage of the properties related to solder composition and mechanical properties.