Open Access Books

This study of the Mumbai, India, terrorist attack of November 2008 identifies the operational and tactical capabilities displayed by the terrorists and evaluates the response of the Indian security forces, with the goal of helping counterterrorism authorities in India and elsewhere to prepare for or counter future terrorist attacks on urban centers.

Dositej Obradović’s Život i priključenija is generally considered the symbolic herald of modern Serbian literature, a paradigmatic text which affected many later writers, including Gerasim Zelić. The paper compares Dositej’s work and Zelić’s Žitije focusing on three levels: firstly, it tracks the common topoi and the distinctive characteristics of the two texts; secondly, it discusses the ways in which Zelić reinterprets Dositej’s model, especially with respect to autobiography and travelogue; finally, it elaborates on the different yet cognate notion of authorship the two texts propose.

This volume is the outcome of a conference on the work of Christopher Bayly held in Naples on March 2016. At less than one year from his untimely death, the convenors called on a group of specialists in several disciplinary areas, on which Bayly has left his enduring mark, to collaborate on a first survey of the rich and complex scientific legacy of the English historian. Each essay focuses on one of the extraordinary succession of great works by which he pioneered innovative approaches throughout his academic career. The collection as a whole provides therefore an account of Bayly’s foremost contributions to the different scholarly fields in which he made repeated breakthroughs, over a period of five decades, on some of the most advanced research fronts of international historiography: the local roots of Indian nationalism, the transition from pre-colonial to colonial India and the role of indigenous society in the establishment of European domination, the nature and limits of colonial power, the rise of the Second British Empire, the history of globalization and the nineteenth-century turn towards planetary modernity, the transregional development of liberalism and nationalism. The common aim of the authors is to highlight the stages of the path through which Bayly emerged, at the beginnings of the 2000s, as a key figure in the current revival and renewal of world history.

Through fifteen varied case studies that draw on a rich array of primary sources, this collection of essays makes the novel claim that early modern European women, like men, had a youth. European culture recognized that, between childhood and full adulthood, early modern women experienced distinctive physiological, social, and psychological transformations. Drawing on two mutually shaped layers of inquiry--cultural constructions of youth and lived experiences--the essays examine a rich array of primary sources, including literary and autobiographical works, conduct literature, asylum and judicial records, drawings, and material culture. The geographical and temporal ranges traverse England, Ireland, Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, Germany, and the Netherlands from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It brings fresh attention to representations of female youth, the training for adulthood, their own life writings, courtship and the emergent sexual lives of young unmarried women.

Dear Colleagues, Many structural metal materials work under the coupling condition of the load and corrosion environment. Therefore, it is necessary to study the corrosion and mechanical behavior of metal structural materials. The corrosion behaviors of metals under the coupling condition of the mechanics and corrosion environment mainly include stress corrosion cracking, hydrogen-induced cracking, corrosion fatigue, erosion corrosion, wear corrosion, etc. From the macroscopic or microscopic point of view, these corrosion damages all involve the fracture process, and fractures are caused by environmental factors, also known as environmental fractures. Thus, this Special Issue, the second volume of "Corrosion and Mechanical Behavior of Metal Materials”, will still focus on the environmental fracture behavior of metal materials. We present the topic, including but not limited to experimental, computational, or theoretical studies on the environmental corrosion fracture of high-strength metal materials.

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.” In Visual Plague, Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient's body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualizing infectious diseases by visualizing the “pandemic” as a new concept and structure of experience—one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence. As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global threat. Nothing contributed to this sense of global interconnectedness, anticipation, and fear more than photography. Exploring the impact of epidemic photography at the time of its emergence, Lynteris highlights its entanglement with colonial politics, epistemologies, and aesthetics, as well as with major shifts in epidemiological thinking and public health practice. He explores the characteristics, uses, and impact of epidemic photography and how it differs from the general corpus of medical photography. The new photography was used not simply to visualize or illustrate a pandemic, but to articulate, respond to, and unsettle key questions of epidemiology and epidemic control, as well as to foster the notion of the “pandemic,” which continues to affect our lives today.

Ce livre est une exploration à deux voix, par le biais des œuvres littéraires, de l’expérience humaine de l’espace. Dans le premier essai, Henri Desbois explique en quoi la confrontation avec la littérature permet à la géographie d’interroger de manière féconde son statut de science humaine. Dans le second essai, Philippe Gervais-Lambony prend pour point de départ une analyse de la restitution de l’expérience de l’espace par Saint-Exupéry et pour point d’arrivée une réflexion sur l’expérience de l’espace urbain. Proust, Cendrars, Camus, Gibson, mais aussi Edith Piaf et bien d’autres, sont mobilisés, pour montrer de quelle façon la littérature permet à la géographie, et plus largement aux sciences sociales, de réintégrer le facteur humain.

The isolation and identification of Helicobacter pylori as the cause of gastrointestinal diseases had major implications for public health and led to curative treatments that reduced suffering from many acute and chronic conditions. Although alternative therapies have been used to improve eradication, current treatments still rely on a combination of antimicrobial agents often associated with antisecretory agents, such as proton pump inhibitors. In this book there is a comprehensive overview by contributors on H. pylori infection in diverse areas, including a general overview of H. pylori infection, and discussions about the principal therapeutic regimens of bacterium eradication, considering antimicrobial resistance. Also, certain aspects of autoimmune gastritis, an important condition that has been related to microorganism infection, is also considered. H. pylori is clearly a very interesting bacterium and great studies and discussions about all its aspects are welcomed by the medical and scientific communities.

The study of earthquakes plays a key role in order to minimize human and material losses when they inevitably occur. Chapters in this book will be devoted to various aspects of earthquake research and analysis. The different sections present in the book span from statistical seismology studies, the latest techniques and advances on earthquake precursors and forecasting, as well as, new methods for early detection, data acquisition and interpretation. The topics are tackled from theoretical advances to practical applications.

Comment la Révolution française transforme-t-elle en profondeur les arènes politiques locales ? Comment les acteurs réinvestissent-ils leur culture et leurs stratégies politiques dans le nouveau cadre administratif forgé par la décennie révolutionnaire ? Comment le bouleversement sans précédent qu’a été la Révolution favorise-t-il la naissance de comportements politiques antagonistes, perceptibles à différentes échelles géographiques ? C’est à toutes ces questions que cet ouvrage se propose de répondre en prenant comme objet d’étude la vallée du Rhône, un espace inhomogène connaissant une vie politique locale particulièrement dynamique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime.

This open access book presents how cutting-edge digital technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain are set to disrupt the financial sector. The book illustrates how recent advances in these technologies facilitate banks, FinTech, and financial institutions to collect, process, analyze, and fully leverage the very large amounts of data that are nowadays produced and exchanged in the sector. To this end, the book also describes some more the most popular Big Data, AI and Blockchain applications in the sector, including novel applications in the areas of Know Your Customer (KYC), Personalized Wealth Management and Asset Management, Portfolio Risk Assessment, as well as variety of novel Usage-based Insurance applications based on Internet-of-Things data. Most of the presented applications have been developed, deployed and validated in real-life digital finance settings in the context of the European Commission funded INFINITECH project, which is a flagship innovation initiative for Big Data and AI in digital finance. This book is ideal for researchers and practitioners in Big Data, AI, banking and digital finance.

Celem opracowania jest analiza problemu i opis dostępnych rozwiązań zabezpieczenia żywności dla mieszkańców miast wobec wyzwań rozwijających się metropolii. Dostarczanie żywności, tak jak dostawy innych artykułów do miast, nastręczają aktualnie wiele trudności. Kontekstem dla rozważań jest zarządzanie miastem, a w szczególności logistyka miejska, bo w jego ramach proponowane są rozwiązania dotyczące barier infrastrukturalnych, kongestii transportowej, czy urban sprawl. Jednym ze sposobów na ich zniwelowanie jest produkcja żywności na miejscu, która traktowana jest jako rozwiązanie zrównoważone. Opracowanie ma charakter interdyscyplinarny i zostało opracowane na bazie literatury z obszaru zarządzania miastem, logistyki miejskiej, rolnictwa miejskiego.

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims. Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

El trabajo aborda el tema de los picós y la champeta en Cartagena resaltando su centralidad en las fiestas y su trascendencia en la vida cotidiana de los habitantes de los barrios populares de la ciudad. Describe y analiza las distintas interacciones de esta música con la fiesta, el cuerpo y el baile, elementos consustanciales de la champeta, música que además se constituye en expresión identitaria de estos barrios. Así mismo la monografía contienen un amplio trabajo de campo que describe detalladamente los actores del universo picotero y los ciclos de producción musical de los diferentes tipos de picó que existen en Cartagena. En el primer capítulo se aborda una geografía musical del fenómeno. El segundo se adentra a describir la estructura de la fiesta picotera, para en el tercero dar paso al lugar que ocupa el cuerpo y el baile dentro de este contexto. El cuarto capítulo expone una serie de tensiones que se desprenden de esta estética, para finalmente concluir que la fiesta de picó es un medio de sustento no sólo económico sino simbólico de una cultura históricamente marginada. Desde la antropología se abordan nociones como, territorio, espacio, lugar, paisaje sonoro, música y musicar, música y poder, fiesta, raza, comunidad, hibridación, resistencia, cuerpo, baile, producción, escena, estética y sus relaciones y tensiones en el campo de lo simbólico. De esta manera se plantea cómo el sonido picotero crea una espacialidad sonora alterna y un contraste entre la Cartagena marginal y la turística, situación que es expresión contemporánea de las relaciones de exclusión y de poder creadas en la ciudad desde la Colonia.

Never have the scope and limits of scientific freedom been more important or more under attack. New science, from artificial intelligence to genomic manipulation, creates unique opportunities to make the world a better place. But it also presents unprecedented dangers, which many believe threaten the survival of humanity and the planet. This collection, by an international and multidisciplinary group of leading thinkers, addresses three vital questions: (1) How are scientific developments impacting on human life and on the structure of societies? (2) How is science regulated, and how should it be regulated? (3) Are there ethical boundaries to scientific developments in some sensitive areas (e.g. robotic intelligence, biosecurity)? The contributors are drawn from many disciplines, and approach the issues in diverse ways to secure the widest representation of the many interests engaged. They include some of the most distinguished academics working in this field, as well as young scholars.