Open Access Books

In science fiction films, we explore remote universes and use yet unknown technologies – the world as we know it is left behind. But although the technical devices in these films are impressive and the science advances in huge steps, the protagonists still search for a superior entity, for the main creator, for a god, for a lost paradise… The human quest for knowledge and for the unknown does not end, and the questions remain the same: What is humankind in relation to the undiscovered universe? Are we, in the near future, able to unravel all the mysteries that have always been tantalizing scientists and religious seekers? What ethical challenges might this progress bring? Will we become gods, “creating” humans by writing genetic codes using synthetic biology? The Interactions between science fiction and religion are manyfold and amazing …

Die Erkundung von Möglichkeiten der Leistungsfähigkeitssteigerung des Eisenbahnsystems an Hoch- und Oberrhein, in Abstimmung mit einer nachhaltigen Raumentwicklung, waren Ausgangslage für ein grenzüberschreitendes Kooperationsprojekt, dessen Ergebnisse im Herbst 2004 von den politischen Vertretern der beteiligten Raumschaften präsentiert wurden. Hintergründe aus Sicht der einzelnen Raumschaften und Fachdiszipline werden in vorliegender Publikation dargestellt.

The Navajo nation is one of the most frequently researched groups of Indians in North America. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and others have taken turns explaining their views of Navajo history and culture. A recurrent theme throughout is that the U.S. government defeated the Navajos so soundly during the early 1860s that after their return from incarceration at Bosque Redondo, they were a badly shattered and submissive people.The next thirty years saw a marked demographic boom during which the Navajo population doubled. Historians disagree as to the extent of this growth, but the position taken by many historians is that because of this growth and the rapidly expanding herds of sheep, cattle, and horses, the government beneficently gave more territory to its suffering wards.While this interpretation is partly accurate, it centers on the role of the government, the legislation that was passed, and the frustrations of the Indian agents who rotated frequently through the Navajo Agency in Fort Defiance, New Mexico, and ignores or severely limits one of the most important actors in this process of land acquisition-the Navajos themselves. Instead of being a downtrodden group of prisoners, defeated militarily in the 1860s and dependent on the U.S. government for protection and guidance in the 1870s and 80s, they were vigorously involved in defending and expanding the borders of their homelands. This was accomplished not through war and as a concerted effort, but by an aggressive defensive policy built on individual action that varied with changing circumstances. Many Navajos never made the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. Instead they eluded capture in northern and western hinterlands and thereby pushed out their frontier. This book focuses on the events and activities in one part of the Navajo borderlands-the northern frontier-where between 1860 and 1900 the Navajos were able to secure a large portion of land that is still part of the reservation. This expansion was achieved during a period when most Native Americans were losing their lands.

The risk estimation of precipitation events with high recurrence periods is difficult due to the limited time scale with meteorological observations. A homogenous distribution of rain gauges, especially in mountainous terrain, is also hardly convertible. In this study an analytical model with a high spatial resolution, designed for stochastic simulations of flood-related precipitation, is developed, evaluated and applied to different investigation areas in Germany.

People all over the globe are experiencing unprecedented and often hazardous situations as environments change at speeds never before experienced. This edited collection proposes that anthropological perspectives on landscape have great potential to address the resulting conundrums. The contributions build particularly on phenomenological, structuralist and multi-species approaches to environmental perception and experience, but they also argue for incorporating political power into analysis alongside dwelling, cosmology and everyday practice. The book’s 13 ethnographically rich chapters explore how the material and the conceptual are entangled in and as landscapes, but it also looks at how these processes unfold at many scales in time and space, involving different actors with different powers. Thus it reaches towards new methodologies and new ways of using anthropology to engage with the sense of crisis concerning environment, movements of people, climate change and other planetary transformations. Dwelling in political landscapes: contemporary anthropological perspectives builds substantially upon anthropological work by Tim Ingold and others, which emphasises the ongoing and open-ended, yet historically conditioned ways in which humans and nonhumans produce the environments they inhabit. In such work, landscapes are understood as the medium and outcome of meaningful life activities, where humans, like other animals, dwell. This means that landscapes are neither social/cultural nor natural, but socio-natural. Protesting against and moving on from the proverbial dualisms of modern, Western and maybe capitalist thought, is only the first step in renewing anthropology’s methodology for the current epoch, however. The contributions ask how seemingly disconnected temporal, representational, economic and other systemic dynamics fold back on lived experience that are materialised in landscapes.

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia's distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics, from Patrick White to Hannah Kent, from Alexis Wright to Christos Tsiolkas, responded to this condition. With rancour, concern and idealism, modern Australian literature conveys a tragic sense of the past yet an abiding vision of the way forward. Birns paints a vivid picture of a rich Australian literary voice - one not lost to the churning of global markets, but in fact given new life by it.

Serialized television drama (dianshiju), perhaps the most popular and influential cultural form in China, offers a wide, penetrating look at the tensions and contradictions of the post-revolutionary and pro-market period. Zhong Xueping's timely new work argues for recognizing the complexity of dianshiju's melodramatic mode and its various subgenres, in effect "refocusing" mainstream Chinese culture. Mainstream Culture Refocused explores the manifestations, in dianshiju, of issues of history and tradition; the cultural and ideological issues surrounding the notion of youth; and how women's emotions are represented in relation to their desire for "happiness." Song lyrics from music composed for television dramas are considered as "popular poetics" that express nostalgia and uncertainty, mirroring the social contradictions of the reform era.

Trust is important in all aspects of our lives—personal and professional. This volume examines many aspects of trust. How can learners trust their mentors and instructors? How can these academics ensure that they are providing inclusive instruction that will help all individuals learn and grow? How can our leaders foster trust in the workplace? How are individuals affected when trust is betrayed? Are our four-legged companions sometimes the most trustworthy beings in our lives? These are just some of the questions this book seeks to answer. Trust that you will find new insights into the complex topic of trust as it relates to psychology.

Le quatrième volume de la série “Archéologie de sauvetage dans la Vallée du Río Chixoy”, publié en 1982 dans le cadre des Cahiers de la RCP 500, est consacré au site de Los Encuentros, situé au confluent du rio Chixoy et durío Salamá. Repéré en 1977, ce site fera l’objet de deux campagnes de fouilles. La première partie de ce cahier, rédigée par Alain Ichon, propose une description de ce centre cérémoniel qui a connu son développement maximum au Classique tardif. La deuxième partie, préparée par Marion P. Hatch, synthétise l’étude du matériel collecté, principalement durant l’opération X qui a permis de de mettre à jour plusieurs niveaux stratigraphiques marqués par des sols nets.

Ce volume rassemble une série de contributions qui ont en commun d’aborder un vieux sujet - le tropisme italien de François Ier - d’une façon originale, dans la mesure où y sont discutées les formes que prirent les relations entre Royaume de France et péninsule italienne à partir d’une perspective italienne. Ce qui est au cœur de l’analyse, ce sont donc moins ici les ambitions du souverain français que la nécessaire adaptation de celles-ci à une réalité italienne complexe et polymorphe. Il s’agit de rendre compte de l’entrelacs de situations juridiques et territoriales aussi diverses qu’anciennes, bouleversées, qui plus est, par des guerres incessantes qui leur confèrent une certaine fragilité. Les guerres modernes, marquées par une intensité, une rapidité et une violence inédites, frappent les contemporains et les obligent à repenser les relations entre petites et grandes puissances au nom des rapports de forces, chacune ayant sa place dans un équilibre international chancelant où la péninsule italienne est alors le premier champ clos de la rivalité entre Valois et Habsbourg. Tour à tour, la Lombardie, la Vénétie, la Savoie, la Ligurie, la Toscane, le Duché d’Urbino, les États de l’Église, le Royaume de Naples comme celui de Sicile deviennent ainsi autant de cas permettant de rendre compte de l’incessante adaptation d’une politique française qui doit évoluer au rythme des défaites militaires successives de l’armée royale. En définitive, c’est moins l’expulsion des Français d’Italie et le renoncement à leurs prétentions outremonts qui sont le sujet de ce livre collectif que la capacité toujours renouvelée du Roi à inventer une nouvelle forme de « politique italienne », au gré de la changeante « qualité des temps » (Machiavel) et de celles des États.

Bridge cranes are widely used as discontinuous material handling systems in industrial environments. The so-called crane bridge plays a central role in the overall construction. With increasing span widths and load capacities, the dimensions of the crane bridge also increase. The core of this work is the design and optimization of a new type of bridge crane system, which consists of individual segments and is eccentrically pretensioned by a tensile member.

Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional analog of metamaterials, have attracted progressively increasing attention in recent years due to their planar configurations and, thus, ease of fabrication, while enabling an unprecedented control over optical fields. The phase, amplitude, polarization, helicity, and even angular momentum of the reflected or transmitted optical fields can be controlled at will by tailoring optically thin planar arrays of resonant subwavelength elements arranged in a periodic or aperiodic manner. As a result, numerous applications and fascinating devices have been realized by designed planar metasurfaces, including beam deflectors, wave plates, flat lenses, holograms, surface wave couplers, and freeform metasurfaces. This Special Issue is launched to provide a possibility for researchers in the area of metasurfaces to highlight the most recent exciting developments and discuss different metasurface configurations in depth, so as to further promote practical applications of metasurfaces. There are 12 papers selected for this Special Issue, representing fascinating progress and potential applications in the area of metasurfaces, which is highly recommended and believed to benefit readers in various aspects.

In the present paper I aim to explore the related area of how, for Galen, emotional states - the soul's affections, or pathē - are connected with bodily states. I shall be doing this largely on the basis of texts which are much less well studied - even amongst Galen scholars - than those just mentioned, and in particular ones which are not overtly works of ‘psychology’ or soul theory at all. In the process I shall be focussing on one particular group of common, we might say everyday, mental or emotional disturbances which Galen discusses, in some detail, in relation to their physical correlates. It is, indeed, striking that most of the detailed material that Galen offers in this area - most of the discussion of this particular set of disturbances - appears, not in his specific work on the affections of the soul, Aff. Pecc. Dig., nor in the other most obviously psychological works, PHP or QAM, but in a range of more general, medical works on disease, health and diagnosis.

The monograph presents the results of theoretical and experimental studies of non-stationary processes of modification of metal surfaces by electric current, by switching it with a liquid-electrolyte electrode. This process is called plasma electrolyte treatment (PET). On the basis of the research carried out, complex hardening technologies and equipment have been created. Technologies allow oxidizing, alloying and changing the structure of local areas of the surface of products, which greatly increases their physical and mechanical properties without changing the structural state of the entire product. The complex of developed technologies multiplies: strength, wear resistance, fatigue strength of products under cyclic loads under conditions of friction and wear. Along with theoretical material, the monograph provides extensive information on the application and efficiency of the developed technologies in industry. The monograph is intended for engineering and technical workers of machine-building enterprises and institutes that specialize in the field of hardening processing of products.

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