Open Access Books

The origin of urbanism is one of the most relevant historical events in the history of humanity, as it is an adaptation to a strategy oriented towards the world economy, which could be linked to the conversion of the human being into the Aristotelian ‘zoon politikon’. This process, with a Mediterranean origin, had an early reception in the Tartessian world, whose central area is located in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, the current provinces of Huelva, Seville and Cadiz, extends to the Algarve in the West, the Guadiana valley of Extremadura in the North and the Cordoba area as the eastern limit. For this reason, the ‘I International Congress on Protohistoric Urbanism’, held in November 2022 at the University of Huelva, revolved around geographical areas, with the participation of the greatest specialists in each of them.The monograph presented is the result of this congress, with 13 chapters by 20 researchers from eight different scientific institutions.

This reprint aims to present the latest achievements in biomaterials science regarding the repair or replacement of tissue functions in the human body. In this reprint, leading experts describe their latest research in the field, including innovative methods for the design of enhanced cochlear implants, cranial implants, and bone implants (jaw, tibia, femur, knee, and hip). Other research works presented in this reprint describe novel methods for the detection of lung cancer, the monitoring of blood glucose, the use of adhesives for orthopedic applications, and the 3D printing of artificial organs.

This is the second Special Issue of papers published in Diversity on the diversity, biogeography and community ecology of ants, a globally dominant faunal group. It covers a diverse range of topics, including microbial ecology, undescribed diversity, functional ecology, biogeography and climate change.

The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field.

Das Buch bietet in kondensierter und zugleich gut verständlicher Form einen Ansatz in der Theorie der Religion und der Methodik ihrer Untersuchung. Basierend auf Bourdieus allgemeiner Sozialtheorie wurde er seit den frühen 1980er Jahren in verschiedenen empirischen Projekten entwickelt und angewandt. Religiöse Praxis wird aus der Spannung zwischen inkorporierten Dispositionen und objektivierten sozialen Existenzbedingungen erschlossen und im Rahmen praxiswissenschaftlicher Konzepte von Identität und Strategie interpretiert.

From the 1920s onwards, the Soviet Union became a favourite destination for Italian writers, travellers who took it upon themselves to interpret and present the new Soviet world to Italian readers by sending articles to newspapers and magazines, most of which were later published as monographs. The present study aims to investigate the reasons that drove so many intellectuals to visit Russia and the Soviet territories after the October. Through references to historical and political ideologies that may have influenced the writers’ interpretations, the reconstruction of travel conditions and individual approaches to Soviet life, the study focuses on Italian intellectuals’ views on the USSR and the particular value that the reportages had in the construction of the image of the Soviet world in the Italian reality.

The book entitled Medicinal Plants and Natural Product Research describes various aspects of ethnopharmacological uses of medicinal plants; extraction, isolation, and identification of bioactive compounds from medicinal plants; various aspects of biological activity such as antioxidant, antimicrobial, anticancer, immunomodulatory activity, etc., as well as characterization of plant secondary metabolites as active substances from medicinal plants.

Published

Changer de prénom, c’est chercher à « devenir soi-même » (ou redevenir soi-même). De nombreux travaux ont pointé les injonctions contemporaines à être authentique sans insister sur les outils aux mains des personnes cherchant à fabriquer leur authenticité. Pour le dire autrement : changer de prénom n’est pas seulement répondre à la question « qui suis-je ? » (à la question de l’identité ou de l’identification étatique), mais c’est aussi répondre à la question de l’authenticité : « qui suis-je en vérité ? ». Identité et authenticité sont ainsi en tension dans les dossiers judiciaires. À travers une étude de la jurisprudence (soixante ans d’arrêts de cours d’appel, plusieurs dizaines d’observations d’audiences dans les tribunaux) et plusieurs mois de travail dans les archives des greffes, Baptiste Coulmont analyse comment le droit, petit à petit, en est venu à considérer le prénom non plus seulement sous l’angle de ses fonctions d’élément de l’état civil, à savoir sa capacité à identifier précisément un individu, mais aussi sous l’angle de ses fonctions connotatives : la capacité du prénom à indiquer l’appartenance à un groupe. S’est ainsi construit un « droit à devenir soi-même », reconnu à présent par des juristes et des magistrats. On peut dès lors déployer une sociologie empirique de la fabrique de l’authenticité, en étudiant, à travers les archives judiciaires, les contextes où elle se manifeste concrètement. Autant d’histoires singulières qui racontent tour à tour le rapport de l’individu à son corps ou à son genre, ou encore à son sentiment d’appartenance nationale.

With the progress made in science and technology, the quality of people's material and cultural lives has improved, meaning that the requirements for product quality and nondestructive testing technology have further increased. Nondestructive testing technology usually includes five conventional testing technologies, namely, eddy current, penetration, magnetic particle, ultrasonic, and X-ray, along with their related new technologies. Usually, different materials need to be detected, and the defects that need to be detected are not the same; for example, for metals, defects include non-metallic pipe defects and slag inclusions, the metal not being welded through, porosity, etc.; for the power transmission of porcelain bottles such as ceramic materials, defects include cracks, porosity, etc. This reprint collected papers about the detection of the most common defects, including surface defects, subsurface defects and so on. Recent advances in sensor technologies form the basis of the development of nondestructive testing technology, data acquirement processing, and image processing technology.

This open access book collates and advances the body of knowledge about the factors, directions, and magnitudes of change in Arabian Gulf families from interdisciplinary perspectives. Family life across the globe is being impacted by unprecedented diversity in household living arrangements and by sweeping economic, cultural, and social change, and this is not an exception in the Gulf region. The book demarcates how Gulf families are experiencing many formidable challenges and undergoing profound changes due to speedy economic transformation, educational reforms, extensive use of social media, rapid urbanization, migration, women empowerment, and the intersections of popular culture from both the East and the West. Notwithstanding such challenges and changes, Gulf families often seem to retain and continue many of the traditional roles and functions of families in a sustained manner. It contributes to current debates that revolve around questions of what has changed, and what has stayed the same, in family structures in the region. Sweeping and comparative, the book provides avenues for offering practical solutions for policy interventions in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. It is a key academic text for sociologists interested in transformations in the family in relation to politics, economics, consumption patterns, education, gender, law, social media, religion, culture, social reforms, and the state.

Im Rahmen der mikroskopischen Verkehrsnachfragemodellierung wird ein Modell vorgestellt, das den für den Planungsraum relevanten Verkehr der in den Außenzellen wohnenden Personen abbildet. Voraussetzung dafür ist die Übertragbarkeit von individuellen Mobilitätsdaten, die auf Basis der Daten des Deutschen Mobilitätspanels (MOP) analysiert wird. Darüber hinaus wird eine Methode zur Abgrenzung von Untersuchungsgebieten für beliebige Planungsräume in Deutschland dargelegt.

Industrial / commercial art & design

Climate change is becoming visible today, and so this book—through including innovative solutions and experimental research as well as state-of-the-art studies in challenging areas related to sustainable energy development based on hybrid energy systems that combine renewable energy systems with fuel cells—represents a useful resource for researchers in these fields. In this context, hydrogen fuel cell technology is one of the alternative solutions for the development of future clean energy systems. As this book presents the latest solutions, readers working in research areas related to the above are invited to read it.

The goal of this work is improving existing and suggesting novel filtering algorithms for nonlinear dynamic state estimation. Nonlinearity is considered in two ways: First, propagation is improved by proposing novel methods for approximating continuous probability distributions by discrete distributions defined on the same continuous domain. Second, nonlinear underlying domains are considered by proposing novel filters that inherently take the underlying geometry of these domains into account.