Open Access Books

For a so-called autonomous death—where someone decides, without the assistance of a physician, to end their life at a self-chosen time and in a self-chosen manner—there is growing attention in the Netherlands. The aim is to die in a dignified and humane way, preferably not alone. Often, the person making this choice is central, but what is the experience of those who remain behind, who have often ensured that their loved one did not die in loneliness? Krina Huisman issued a call to these individuals to share their stories. She asked them to write a letter addressed to their deceased loved one about their experience with autonomous death and the consequences of this way of dying for their further lives. In Nabestaan, Huisman offers a realistic and poignant portrayal of what a self-chosen death can mean for the bereaved and how they carry this loss with them.

Prince Dipanagara led the Javanese armies in the Java War (1825–30), 30), the last stand of Java’s Old Order against Dutch colonial rule. Some participants immortalised the conflict in verse chronicles known generically as Babad Dipanagara. This book comprises a transliteration of one such Javanese text together with a long introduction, translations into English and Indonesian Malay, and detailed notes.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Despite the central importance that water has held for civilizations both ancient and modern, its social significance has made surprisingly little impact on our contemporary understanding of human history and development. Dominant interpretations of the relationship between society and nature have remained water blind. In Water and Society historian and leading water expert Terje Tvedt argues for a change that acknowledges the significant role played by water in societal development. Reflecting his expertise as a geographer, historian and a political scientist, and drawing on his wide experience of water issues around the world, Terje Tvedt s Water and Society provides a long overdue reappraisal of the relationship between water and society, one that gives water its rightful place as central to any true understanding of human history and development."

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are gene-encoded, ancient (and important) mediators of innate host defense that exert direct or indirect antimicrobial action as well as possessing other important biologic activities (e.g., neutralization of endotoxin and anti-biofilm action) that help to protect vertebrates, invertebrates and plants from invading pathogens. While the emergence of multi-antibiotic resistant pathogens (and the desperate need to develop new anti-infectives) has been a recent force driving the field, interest in AMPs has an earlier origin in studies of how phagocytes kill bacteria by oxygen-independent processes. AMPs responsible for such killing of microbes by rabbit and human neutrophils were later purified by Ganz, Selsted and Lehrer, which they termed defensins; at the time of this writing, literally thousands of defensin-based publications can be found in the scientific literature! The initial reports on defensins and the earlier report by Boman’s group on the purification and action of an insect AMP represented a historical and defining point for the AMP field as they, in hindsight, demanded the recognition of AMP research as a unique discipline that has important linkages to other important fields of medicine, especially those of microbiology, infectious diseases and immunology. On a personal note, I remember conferences on phagocytes and host defense in the early 1980s where the topic of AMPs was relegated to one short session in a five day period! Now, we have hundreds of international “AMPologists” with expertise in chemistry, biochemistry, molecular and structural biology, cell biology, microbiology, pharmacology, or medicine who have built their research careers around AMPs and can now attend international conferences dedicated to advances in AMP research.

The book has fourteen chapters which are grouped under different sections: Immune System and Glomerulonephritis, Animal Models of Glomerulonephritis, Cytokines and Signalling Pathways, Role of Cells and Organelles in Glomerulonephritis and Miscellaneous. While the purpose of this volume is to serve as an update on recent advances in the etio-pathogenesis of glomerulopathies, the book offers the current and broad based knowledge in the field to readers of all levels in the nephrology community.

Published

“The book Acquisition of alphabetic writing in democratic schools: epistemological and educational implications, by Bruna Assem Sasso, brings great contributions to teachers and students in the area of Education regarding the history of Piagetian ideas in Brazil, as well as the assimilation of Psychogenesis in the state of São Paulo in the 1980s. It also discusses the way in which two democratic schools, one private and the other public, appropriated the said Theory. The author writes in a clear and inviting way, holding the reader's attention.” PROF. DR. MARIA LUCIA MARQUES.

The chapters of this reprint cover a wide range of topics related to the theoretical aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as well as their practical applications. The theoretical aspects presented in this reprint are related to model compression, interpretable AI, effective augmentation strategies, time series analysis, etc., but most of the works are applicative and multidisciplinary. The applications include but are not limited to, medical image processing, natural language processing, time series analysis, diffusion model-based music generation, autoencoder applications, and adversarial learning, to name a few. By compiling such a diverse set of articles, the reprint aims to serve as a resource for researchers and AI enthusiasts and to offer them insights into the latest advancements and diverse applications of AI and ML. This reprint includes 26 articles accepted and published in the Special Issue “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Based Methods and Applications, 2023” of the MDPI “Mathematics” journal.

This unique open access collection offers an in-depth understanding of UK-EU police and judicial cooperation post-Brexit, an under-explored field. It considers the legal and political operation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) and its implications for a wide number of policy areas. As well as critiquing its operation, contributors suggest reforms that would improve police and judicial cooperation between the UK and the EU. This scholarly discussion is balanced against practical considerations, with short chapters setting out practitioners’ perspectives on the TCA. It ends by reflecting on lessons that non-EU countries seeking cooperation with the EU might learn. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Northumbria University.

This edited volume looks at the spread of settlements and the development of living conditions favorable to permanent peasant habitation in Finland during the pre-industrial period. The case to study in this volume is the relatively late settled northernmost part of Savo, now known as the Upper Savo (Ylä-Savo in Finnish) region, which was a border region between Sweden and Russia until the first half of the 17th century. The aim of the volume is to deepen conceptual and empirical knowledge of what kind of living conditions the late-populated frontier offered to settlers and their descendants from the beginning of settlement to the early industrialization. At the end of the 19th century Upper Savo was known as an example of misery, poverty and backwardness in Finland. This volume, however, shows that this perception of exceptional poverty and backwardness is not unambiguous, let alone self-imposed by the people living in the area. Despite its land resources, Upper Savo has been in a position to catch up with the core areas of settlement throughout its history, such as the later settled peripheries and border regions in general. In this work, we show that the development of the conditions for living in Upper Savo has been strongly path-dependent: the region can do nothing about its history and location. The photographs of Ahti Rytkönen (1899–1989) are at the core of the rich artwork of this volume. Rytkönen’s black-and-white photographs of the northern Savo countryside with its inhabitants and slash-and-burn fields from the 1920s and 1930s are unique depictions of the life of Upper Savo rural society.

Cheese is a palatable and dense model food with great nutritional value. Cheese lovers all over the world have access to an almost overwhelming variety of cheeses. Cheese has many health benefits that go beyond its nutritional and flavor properties. The health benefits are due to the presence of unique bioactive peptides and fatty acids in cheese. Furthermore, cheese is an excellent tool for making functional foods because it can serve as an excellent delivery vehicle for bioactive peptides, vitamins, minerals, probiotics, postbiotics, prebiotics, and other novel bioactive substances. This book offers opportunities for cheese manufacturers, cheese researchers, nutritionists, and even cheese lovers to learn more about the hidden health and nutritive benefits of cheese. The book reflects the trends and innovations in the development of cheese as a functional food.

What is the state of gender equality in science and technology? Gender Equality in Academia – from Knowledge to Change presents the results of a comprehensive research project and program of initiatives at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Researchers have examined gender equality within the department, looking at reasons for imbalance, and at what occurs when measures to promote equality are implemented. The book opens with an in-depth study of careers, gender issues and gender balance within academia. The study, based on questionnaires, interviews and follow-up evaluation, provides a new and updated understanding of the daily lives of academics in Norway. Among the topics covered are perceptions of equality and gender balance, effects of male dominance, sexual harassment, gender with respect to publishing, and the relationship between gender and diversity. In addition to presenting new empirical data, the book is also an innovative contribution to theoretical development within gender equality research. In the second part of the book, the authors present three working models that elucidate current mechanisms recreating gender imbalance, and challenges for gender equality. The book’s final part consists of analyses of measures taken to increase gender equality within the department and their effects, and what an organization can do to increase gender equality. The range of topics in this book make it relevant for everyone concerned with gender equality in research and higher education. Researchers, administrators, students, other practitioners, and politicians will all find this book of interest.

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Constituting Religion examines how activists work to expand or challenge the reach of the shariah court system, and how these legal struggles shape popular understandings of Islam, liberal rights. This title is also available as Open Access.

The challenges of managing resource use in the world's largest democracy Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose the failures of state governance to regulate use. State policies and institutions influenced by global models of reform produce and magnify socio-economic injustice in this "water bureaucracy." Drawing on historical records, an analysis of post-liberalization developments, and fieldwork in the city of Chennai, Leela Fernandes traces the configuration of colonial historical legacies, developmental-state policies, and economic reforms that strain water resources and intensify inequality. While reforms of water governance promote privatization and decentralization, they strengthen the state centralized control over water through city-based development models. Understanding the political economy of water thus illuminates the consequent failures of the state within countries of the Global South.