Open Access Books

This book contains all the articles published in the Special Issue "Dynamic Modeling and Simulation for Control Systems" from the MDPI Mathematics journal. This Special Issue aims to cover important aspects of how to optimize the dynamic behavior of physical systems using special algorithms and artificial intelligence in the modeling, simulation, and optimization of components and systems from important fields such as astronautics, aerospace, avionics, robotics, manufacturing systems, mechanical engineering, power energy, materials technology, and neurorehabilitation. It is our hope that this Special Issue will contribute to the research on techniques for the modeling, simulation, and optimization of control systems in dynamic systems.

Mediante un análisis de las representaciones humorísticas de la justicia ateniense en la comedia antigua, este libro se ocupa de relevar y analizar los modos en que el derecho es revelado, imitado, privatizado, suspendido, enseñado o proyectado en el corpus aristofánico. A través de una verdadera poética cómica de la justicia, las distintas estrategias empleadas por Aristófanes en las primeras seis obras de su producción literaria se canalizan hacia la explotación estética del nómos como un recurso primordial de la composición cómica. Sobre la escena, la destreza del dramaturgo se vale de los mecanismos de hiperbolización, distorsión y transcontextualización para refractar la excesiva litigiosidad ateniense y burlarse de la centralidad del universo forense frente a sus espectadores. Este volumen, que constituye el primer estudio acerca de los cruces entre la dimensión normativa y la comediografía política griega, procura ilustrar la importancia del género como fuente para una mejor comprensión del orden legal de la Atenas de fines del siglo V a.C. y, al mismo tiempo, rescatar la utilidad de lo jurídico para una mejor interpretación de las piezas conservadas a partir de un examen de los dispositivos regulatorios en juego.

Ce volume de Profils américains comprend une introduction et onze contributions. L’introduction rappelle la place du réalisme howellsien dans les années 1870-1890, résumant les différentes périodes de l’œuvre, ses thématiques ainsi que la réaction critique. Le chapitre de Heinz Ickstadt compare l’œuvre tardive de Howells avec celle de Henry James, les mettant toutes deux en regard avec le pragmatisme de William James. Le chapitre de Jean Rivière étudie la dimension « eurocentrique » de l’œuvre de Howells. Dans « The Angle(s) of Truth », Cécile Roudeau examine la façon dont le romancier concilie couleur locale et visée représentative. Dans « Reality/Realities/Realism », Denise Ginfray analyse le rapport du langage réaliste au sens et à la vérité. L’article de Claude Dorey met au jour le « scénario coupable » dissimulé sous la surface de The Rise of Silas Lapham, tandis que celui d’Erik Rorabak relit Silas Lapham à la lumière des théories de Walter Benjamin et de Guy Debord. L’étude proposée par Michèle Bonnet révèle un équilibre subtil entre comédie et analyse psychologique dans Indian Summer. Le chapitre de Nathalie Cochoy montre comment A Hazard of New Fortunes renouvelle le réalisme urbain, les mutations urbaines affectant à la fois le psychisme et l’écriture. Guillaume Tanguy se penche sur le rapport entre découverte de la métropole new-yorkaise et renouvellement esthétique. Enfin, Marc Amfreville révèle un visage inattendu de Howells, lié à l’utilisation du gothique et au motif de la « tache » indélébile que constitue le « sang noir » dans The Shadow of a Dream et An Imperative Duty respectivement.

In the early 1970s, a number of West German left-wing activists took up arms, believing that revolution would lead to social change. In the years to come, the bombings, shootings, kidnappings and bank robberies of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and Movement 2nd June dominated newspaper headlines and polarized legislative debates. Half of the terrorists declaring war on the West German state were women who understood their violent political actions to be part of their liberation from restrictive gender norms. As women participating in a brand of systematic violence usually associated with masculinity, they presented a cultural paradox, and their political decisions were viewed as gender transgressions by the state, the public, and even the burgeoning women’s movement, which considered violence as patriarchal and unfeminist. Death in the Shape of a Young Girl questions this separation of political violence from feminist politics and offers a new understanding of left-wing female terrorists’ actions as feminist practices that challenged existing gender ideologies. Patricia Melzer draws on archival sources, unpublished letters, and interviews with former activists to paint a fresh and interdisciplinary picture of West Germany’s most notorious political group, from feminist responses to sexist media coverage of female terrorists to the gendered nature of their infamous hunger strikes while in prison. Placing the controversial actions of the Red Army Faction into the context of feminist politics, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl offers an innovative and engaging cultural history that foregrounds how gender shapes our perception of women’s political choices and of any kind of political violence.

L'explosion soudaine de voix féminines qui caractérise le spectacle contemporain nous invite à réfléchir à des modes de discours qui, loin d'être nécessairement révolutionnaires, restent complémentaires des voix antérieures. Diverses sont les approches, comme le sont encore les problématiques, soulignant à l'envi le caractère pluridisciplinaire de notre entreprise, la présence de voix de femmes là où on ne les attend guère. "Les voix du spectacle vivant" prolongent les échos vibrants de voix chères venues d'ailleurs, venues de loin ; inflexions de tendresse, d'amitié, de pugnacité, d'intolérance aussi.

Trademark rights play a significant role in the proper functioning of a common market of a given regional bloc. Experience teaches that, unless national trade mark regimes of individual countries cooperating in a given regional bloc such as the East African Community (EAC) are integrated into a common market, trademark proprietors may invoke their intellectual property rights to dissect the common market into different national markets and in that way blocking the free movement of trademarked goods from one part of the common market to the other. This book is therefore intended as guideline when addressing the challenges posed on a regional common market by the absence of a common market for trademarked goods. The study provides for legal techniques through which the latter market may be established to compliment an existing common market as a policy choice in favour of the principle of free movement of goods. To this end, the book analyses key principles that govern the EU’s community trade mark system and determines the extent to which these principles may be adapted to suit the EAC common market.

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation charts the connections between photography and a crucial issue in contemporary social history. The book examines the prevalence of photography in cultural responses to processes of truth and reconciliation, and argues that photographs are a valuable means through which stories can be retold and historiography can be rethought. Five compelling case studies from Argentina, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Cambodia underscore the special role that this medium has played in facilitating processes of recovery, and in reconstructing suppressed histories, even when a documentary record of the events does not exist. The diverse practices addressed in this book – including artistic, protest, institutional, archival, legal and personal photography – prompt a new consideration of photography’s links to presence, place, time, spectatorship and justice. Collectively, these practices attest to photography’s key role in transitional justice, and in shaping historical understanding internationally. Important reading for students taking photography, visual culture, history and media studies courses, Photography, Truth and Reconciliation explores key historical and theoretical themes, including photography and testimony, international discourses on human rights and justice, and problematic notions of public and collective memory.

One of the principal goals of antipoverty efforts should be to improve the absolute living standards of the least well-off. This book aims to enhance our understanding of how to do that, drawing on the experiences of twenty affluent countries since the 1970s. The book addresses a set of questions at the heart of political economy and public policy: How much does economic growth help the poor? When and why does growth fail to trickle down? How can social policy help? Can a country have a sizeable low-wage sector yet few poor households? Are universal programs better than targeted ones? What role can public services play in antipoverty efforts? What is the best tax mix? Is more social spending better for the poor? If we commit to improvement in the absolute living standards of the least well-off, must we sacrifice other desirable outcomes?

Die Altmark schlägt die Brücke vom westelbischen Sachsen zum ostelbischen Landesausbaugebiet auf dem Boden slawischer Stämme und Völker, politisch, wirtschaftlich, ethnisch und kulturell. Bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts ostsächsische Grenzregion des Reiches und des Herzogtums Sachsen, wuchsen die Teilregionen auf dem Boden der sich erst nach und nach formierenden Altmark in den Machtkämpfen des Spätmittelalters zu einem der Hauptkreise der Mark Brandenburg zusammen. Die Altmark bewahrte aber vielerlei historische Wurzeln, bis zur Reformationszeit ihre Zugehörigkeit zu den sächsischen Bistümern Halberstadt und Verden, die enge Verflechtung der acht Immediatstädte mit Hansestädten, soziokulturelle Eigentümlichkeiten u.a.m., und auch in der Frühneuzeit, die den zeitlichen Schwerpunkt des Buches bildet, vielerlei Bezüge zu den politischen Nachbarn, den Fürstentümern Magdeburg und Halberstadt, Braunschweig und Lüneburg mit dem Wendland. Daraus erwächst von selbst der vergleichende Aspekt, wie er auch den ostelbischen Regionen der Mark Brandenburg gilt. Die Vergleiche heben die Merkmale hervor, die die Altmark bis zum Ende des Alten Reiches charakterisieren: eigenständige Gerichtsinstanzen, gute besitz- und personenrechtliche Verhältnisse der bäuerlichen Bevölkerung, eine auf verbriefte Privilegien wie auf angemaßte Observanzen pochende Ritterschaft, starke kommunale Kräfte in Stadt und Land, Bürgerschaften und Landgemeinden, die ihren Anspruch auf Selbst- und Mitbestimmung nicht aufgaben und auch im Zeitalter des Absolutismus um ökonomische, soziale und kulturelle Freiräume kämpften. Das manifestiert sich in vielfältigen, aus archivalischen Quellen ermittelten sozialen wie individuellen Handlungen, Verhaltens-, Lebens- und Denkweisen unterschiedlicher Interessengemeinschaften und gesellschaftlicher Gruppierungen in ihrem Mit- und Gegeneinander. Das Buch wendet sich sowohl an Fachkollegen der Landes-, Agrar- und Stadt-, Siedlungs-, Verfassungs-, Wirtschafts- und Sozial-, Kultur- und Alltagsgeschichte als auch an historisch Interessierte überhaupt, an Regional- und Ortshistoriker. Es bietet vielfältige neue Erkenntnisse und gibt Anstöße zum Weiterforschen.

The book has been developed with the objective of collecting a series of guidelines or notes to improve the performance of the teaching work. In the first place, the training of the professional of education is essential not only in the competences acquired in the academic degrees, but also the subsequent training, which implies the update by the teacher for the improvement of their professional work. The book will mark certain action guidelines before students with specific educational support needs. In this regard, some keys to the improvement of learning, behavior, prevention of coexistence problems such as school violence, risk behaviors such as drug use, etc.

Someone has taken a trip and taken photographs of that trip and someone else has been invited to watch a slideshow of the trip taken. There is a road, there is an abstract painting, there is a viewer who wishes he could live in a televised loop of a sunset and another who wonders why people are fat. Tribulations of a Westerner in the Western World is a stunning first book by Vincent Dachy, a narrated slideshow of inner and outer geographies complete with 52 black and white photographs taken by the author.

This chapter describes the ‘Sex and History’ project which uses objects from the past as the basis for discussions with young people about sexuality, as part of sexuality education. The chapter outlines key aspects of a methodology in which historical and cultural distance, coupled with striking familiarities in concerns about sex throughout history, bring contemporary expectations and norms into sharper focus and encourage young people to re-consider them critically. This chapter considers the different contexts within which this methodology can be applied and the challenges of trying to embed it into mainstream UK education. It describes how the project responds to international calls for a multidisciplinary approach to young people’s healthy development and the importance of non-biological dimensions to sexuality education, such as consent, gender, body image and the impact of pornography.

In the history of neuroscience it had long been a virtually axiomatic belief that the mature mammalian nervous system was hardwired and fixed. This view goes back to the work of Louis Broca in the 1850s and has been perhaps most famously articulated by Ramon y Cajal. The immature nervous system was thought to have considerable plasticity, but after maturity the CNS was not considered to be capable of repairing itself after damage. In the last two decades, however, persuasive evidence has been accumulating at an increasing rate that the plasticity of the nervous system persists throughout the lifespan. Beginning 14 years ago, an efficacious form of neurorehabilitation termed Constraint-Induced Movement therapy or CI therapy was shown to produce marked neuroplastic changes in the brain. It has been proposed that CI therapy harnesses neuroplasticity in the service of restoring motor and language function lost as a result of such injuries to the central nervous system as stroke, traumatic brain injury, and cerebral palsy. The proposed journal issue will include articles by the main investigators involved in the development of this body of research. There will also be articles on the role of neurogenesis in the recovery of function after CNS damage encouraged by the stimulation of endogenous stem cell production, exogenous stem cell implantation, and pharmacological means. There will also be two articles describing the work carried out to date on the use of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and Transcranial Electrical Stimulation (TDCS) to increase the excitability of the brain in order to enhance the recovery of function after stroke.

Oil, like other fossil fuels, permeates every aspect of human existence. Yet it has been largely ignored by cultural critics, especially in the context of the Global South. Seeking to make visible not only the pervasiveness of oil in society and culture but also its power, Oil Fictions stages a critical intervention that aligns with the broader goals of the energy humanities.Exploring literature and film about petroleum as a genre of world literature, Oil Fictions focuses on the ubiquity of oil as well as the cultural response to petroleum in postcolonial states. The chapters engage with African, South American, South Asian, Iranian, and transnational petrofictions and cover topics such as the relationship of colonialism to the fossil fuel economy, issues of gender in the Thermocene epoch, and discussions of migration, precarious labor, and the petro-diaspora. This unique exploration includes testimonies of the oil encounter—through memoirs, journals, and interviews—from a diverse geopolitical grid, ranging from the Permian Basin to the Persian Gulf.By engaging with non-Western literary responses to petroleum in a concentrated, sustained way, this pathbreaking book illuminates the transnational dimensions of the discourse on oil. It will appeal to scholars and students working in literature and science studies, energy humanities, ecocriticism, petrocriticism, environmental humanities, and Anthropocene studies.In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Henry Obi Ajumeze, Rebecca Babcock, Ashley Dawson, Sharae Deckard, Scott DeVries, Kristen Figgins, Amitav Ghosh, Corbin Hiday, Helen Kapstein, Micheal Angelo Rumore, Simon Ryle, Sheena Stief, Imre Szeman, Maya Vinai, and Wendy W. Walters.

Homem que é homem não chora, não sente medo, não fica doente, não vai ao médico. Este modelo hegemônico de masculinidade afeta negativamente a saúde e, muitas vezes, inviabiliza práticas de cuidado. A constatação não é nova, mas ainda não havia na literatura uma obra que discutisse a saúde do homem de forma integral e abrangente – a maioria dos trabalhos acadêmicos coloca em foco a saúde da mulher. A lacuna acaba de ser preenchida com o lançamento deste livro. A coletânea trabalha com a perspectiva de gênero e não é voltada apenas para a clínica médica, inserindo o debate no campo da saúde coletiva. Assinados por uma variada gama de especialistas, como médicos, psicólogos, sociólogos e antropólogos, os capítulos discutem integralidade em saúde, gênero, juventude, exclusão social, discriminação, sexualidade, reprodução, violência e homofobia, entre outros temas.