Open Access Books

Creating an inclusive environment where different software developers can feel welcome and leverage their talents is an ethical imperative no company can ignore. Indeed, software organizations have in the last decade been trying to make changes for a more diverse and inclusive software development environment. The push for increased diversity in software has been a public one, from annual diversity reports by some of the worlds’ most visible companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, to large projects such as Linux Foundation’s Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion project that explores, evaluates, and promotes best practices from research and industry to increase diversity and inclusion in software engineering. Despite these many efforts, diversity remains low. Numbers from the software industry show that less than 25% of software engineers are women. Diversity is also low in regards to many other facets of diversity. This book provides an overview of research into the different aspects of diversity and inclusion in software engineering, as well as the tools, methods, and practices proposed to foster diversity and to build inclusive software teams and development environments. It describes research challenges in studying diversity and inclusion in software. Readers will be challenged to consider how they are contributing to a lack of inclusion and what they can do to improve inclusion in the software industry. What You Will Learn Aspects of diversity (e.g., age, culture, gender, race) and relationship to software engineering activities and outcomes How to measure diversity Investigations of intersectionality in software engineering Research methods for the study of diversity and inclusion in software engineering Empirical studies of effective practices to foster diversity and inclusion in software engineering Interventions and programs that have been used to successfully support retention in software engineering Software engineering education for diverse and inclusive software engineering, and proven teaching methods/environments that support diverse and inclusive software engineering Who This Book Is For For Researchers, the book presents a state-of-the-art collection of existing studies into many aspects of diversity, methods, and tools proposed and tried out in practice, challenges in research, and contributing to a research agenda on this topic for future studies. For Industry practitioners, the book describes efforts to investigate diversity in software teams, whether in corporate or open source environments. It also describes empirical evidence about effectiveness of certain methods and approaches to foster diversity and inclusion in software development. For Educators,the book describes practices and effective changes in Computer Science/Software Engineering curricula that were found as effective in engaging learners from minoritized groups, creating inclusive software teams that are diverse, and which relate to educational material useful for training for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This volume sets out to explore the world of domestic devotions and is premised on the assumption that the home was a central space of religious practice and experience throughout the early modern world. The contributions to this book, which deal with themes dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, tell of the intimate relationship between humans and the sacred within the walls of the home. The volume demonstrates that the home cannot be studied in isolation: the sixteen essays, that encompass religious history, the histories of art and architecture, material culture, literary history, and social and cultural history, instead point individually and collectively to the porosity of the home and its connectedness with other institutions and broader communities.

The modern university can trace its roots to Kant's call for enlightened self-determination, with education aiming to produce an informed and responsible body of citizens. As the university evolved, specialized areas of investigation emerged, enabling ever more precise research and increasingly nuanced arguments. In recent decades, however, challenges to the hegemony of disciplines have arisen, partly in response to a perceived need for the university to focus greater energy on its public vocation—teaching and the dissemination of knowledge. Valences of Interdisciplinarity presents essays by an international array of scholars committed to enhancing our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings and the practical realities of interdisciplinary teaching and research. What is, and what should be, motivating our reflections on (and practice of) approaches that transcend the conventional boundaries of discipline? And in adopting such transdisciplinary approaches, how do we safeguard critical methods and academic rigour? Reflecting on the obstacles they have encountered both as thinkers and as educators, the authors map out innovative new directions for the interdisciplinary project. Together, the essays promise to set the standards of the debate about interdisciplinarity for years to come.

Le second ouvrage de la collection “l'Univers des Vignerons” consacré à la commune de Saint-Emilion est l'œuvre de deux géographes et d'une sociologue. À l'évidence il ne s'agit pas d'un nouveau livre sur les vignobles et les vins de ce bourg dont la réputation mondiale n'est plus à faire. Il s'agit plutôt de trois études sur des points particuliers peu étudiés jusqu'à présent. L'analyse approfondie du cadastre de 1847 restitue l'état rural et social de la commune au milieu du xixe siècle, point de départ d'une autre étude sur l'activité des vignerons dans la défense de leur cru (avec en particulier un intérêt tout spécial porté à l'histoire du syndicat viticole, la naissance de la notion de “château”, la création de la cave coopérative et des classements...). Mais à cette intense action des viticulteurs répondait une aussi intense activité associative dont témoigne le grand nombre de groupes divers, culturels, sportifs ou autres...

« À bon cheval et à mauvais cheval il faut l’éperon ; à bonne femme et à mauvaise femme il faut un maître, et à certaines du bâton. » Ce proverbe, cité par Paolo da Certaldo, un Florentin du XIVe siècle, révèle une société où les femmes demeurent dans un état de subordination permanent dont témoignent, en effet, les livres de raison de ses compatriotes. Cette étude de l’ensemble des chroniques florentines, écrites en latin et en langue vulgaire, depuis la « Légende des Origines » et les « Ge...

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Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) is increasingly recognized as an attractive alternative to national court proceedings, especially in international business relations. This open access book focuses on ADR mechanisms in one specific geographical region: the Western Balkans. This region comprises Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia. Although these countries generally have legal frameworks for ADR mechanisms in place, they remain largely underutilised in practice. Promoting ADR mechanisms in the countries of the Western Balkans could make them more attractive to foreign investors, thereby fostering economic growth. Additionally, the effective implementation of ADR mechanisms could have spill-over effects on national judiciaries, thereby increasing domestic rule of law standards. This would be highly beneficial for the Western Balkan countries, most of which are still aspiring to become Member States of the European Union (EU). To achieve this, they are required to promote the use of ADR mechanisms and align their legal frameworks with EU standards. Against this background, this book aims to explore the trends and challenges of ADR in the Western Balkans. The different chapters primarily focus on international commercial arbitration, investment treaty arbitration, and mediation. Some chapters address systemic challenges, such as capacity building and dispute prevention, which extend to the entire region. Others offer country-specific analyses of particular national framework. While some chapters adopt the perspective of international or EU law, others remain at the national level. Collectively, the wide diversity in topics and perspectives provides a comprehensive overview of the trends and challenges of ADR mechanisms in the Western Balkan.

Antiblackness and Global Health offers a major new account of the 2014-2016 West African Ebola crisis and a radical perspective on the racial politics of global health. Lioba Hirsch traces the legacies of colonialism across the landscape of global health in Sierra Leone, showing how this history underpinned the international response to Ebola. The book moves from the material and atmospheric traces of colonialism and enslavement in Freetown, to the forms of knowledge presented in colonial archives and in contemporary expert accounts, to disease control and care practices. As the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, health inequalities around the world disproportionately affect people of African descent. This book aims to equip critical scholars, medical and humanitarian practitioners, policy makers and health activists with the tools and knowledge to challenge antiblackness in global health practice and politics. The book argues that Black Studies can inform future research on medical interventions in Africa by unpacking postcolonial silences, centring Black perspectives and highlighting the endurance of colonial infrastructures in the present.

Le Carte, consisting of three huge volumes, are a precious mine for the researcher interested in Luigi Meneghello: collecting fragments of ideas, work projects, stories, thoughts from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties – polished and rewritten in the late Nineties –, they allow us to enter the writer’s unofficial macrotext, the extraordinary flood of three decades of words that Meneghello used to contrast the endless flow of time. The present work aims to intrigue the reader through some of the various threads that are possible to find in the author’s backroom, trying to take a comprehensive look at the complexity of the author’s fertile greparo of rejected literary shards, lying beyond any rigid literary classification.

This reprint presents a collection of contributions on the application of high-performing computational strategies and enhanced theoretical formulations to solve a wide variety of linear or nonlinear problems in a multiphysical sense, together with different experimental studies.

In response to societal changes, higher engineering education is increasingly seeking innovative educational concepts that integrate deep disciplinary knowledge with a broad understanding of other disciplines and systems. Future professionals must be flexible and adaptive, capable of making informed decisions based on complex and often limited information. A common thread in innovative educational approaches such as problem-based learning, challenge-based learning, and transdisciplinary education is the cultivation of adaptive expertise and the ability to demonstrate this expertise in everyday practice. However, adaptive performance is seldom explicitly addressed in the literature on these concepts. This gap inspired the editors of this volume to compile a diverse array of practices that illustrate and explain adaptive expertise and performance, highlighting its relevance and providing inspiration for educators and researchers. This volume presents a collection of studies on adaptive performance, organised into thematic sections that address: Part I: Conceptual deepening and underlying mechanisms of adaptive performance in the context of workplace-based learning in engineering. Part II: Methods for stimulating adaptive performance in various contexts. Part III: Formative assessment of adaptive performance.

This volume historicises the debate on ‘critical’ raw materials and their logistics. It broadens the concept of ‘resource criticality’ beyond supply and demand to include dimensions such as urban-rural contexts, social distribution and environmental impact. Three case studies on the early modern period explore the supply of cities and armies with wood and grain as essential goods, even during times of crisis. The four contributions on the 19th and 20th centuries analyse copper, diamonds, rubber and African palm products for local and global consumption, in their transnational (post-)colonial entanglements. These historical case studies contribute to an understanding of today's supply chains, global dependencies and resource conflicts. With contributions byDavid Drengk | Stefan Huber | Gisela Hürlimann | Elias Knapp | Lena Sophia Krause | Mona Rudolph | Franziska Sedlmair | Georg Stöger | Dennis Yazici

The term 'international economy' is very broad, variously defined, and increasingly complex in the 21st century. This paper assumes that it is a system of economic, social and cultural links that develop in stages between dynamically changing participants, with increasingly complex structures, that collectively facilitate the international process of production and exchange of goods, services and ideas. This process involves all countries and regions and is carried out simultaneously at many levels: micro-, meso-, macro- and meta-economic, which interact with each other. The authors' aim was to create a concise theoretical and conceptual base, necessary for a comprehensive assessment of the changes taking place in individual economies, as well as in the global economic system. The monograph is a collection of basic definitions, classifications, information on structures and mechanisms, as well as sources of theoretical foundations, which can be used as a basis for more in-depth research. Definitions and concepts relating to: trade and investment policy; international competitiveness of economies; the development of transnational corporations; the importance of globalisation processes; the evolution of the institutional structure of the international economy (including: GATT-WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group) have been presented. The paper presents the author's concept of assessing the international competitiveness of economies on the basis of a systemically-balanced model, emphasising the importance of four levels of establishing competitiveness (micro-, meso-, macro- and meta-economic) and the necessity of a comprehensive study of it, taking into account: baseline competitiveness (resources, potential), operational competitiveness (capabilities, instruments), competence competitiveness (key competences, advantage) and systemic competitiveness.

The United States presents the greatest source of global geo-political violence and instability. Guided by the radical political economy tradition, this book offers an analysis of the USA’s historical impulse to weaponize communication technologies. Scott Timcke explores the foundations of this impulse, then demonstrates how the militarization of digital society creates structural injustices and social inequalities. He analyses how new digital communication technologies support and fund indirect and informal means that ensures American paramountcy, in turn sustaining enduring conditions for worldwide capital accumulation. Identifying selected features of contemporary American society, Capital, State, Empire undertakes a materialist critique of this digital society and assesses the impact of The New American Way of War, understood here as an outcome of a capitalist state’s military budgets priorities under imperial strategy.

In the last decade, design and material innovations for manufacturing composites have reached new heights. Thermoplastic polymers and their composites have become the most in-demand materials in recent times as they provide numerous advantages over thermoset composites. Thermoplastic polymers have a high damage tolerance, high impact resistance, recyclability, formability, weldability, repairability, and cost-effectiveness compared with thermoset composites. Thermoplastic polymers and composites are widely used in automotive, aerospace, electrical and electronics, industrial, and medical applications. Thermoplastic composites are estimated to grow from USD 28.0 billion in 2019 to USD 36.0 billion by 2024. High-performance thermoplastic materials are used in conjunction with a multitude of manufacturing processes like injection moulding, thermoforming, prepreg, liquid injection processes, automated tape placement, filament winding, pultrusion, additive manufacturing, and other processes. The material limits, design, and assembly requirements, as well as the processing constraints, are significantly important for the realisation of novel product development using a manufacturing process by simultaneously optimising reliability, safety, and other performance-related issues. The current thermoplastic material systems and manufacturing techniques still have plenty of room for optimisation and advancement. This reprint presents the latest scientific and technical advances in thermoplastic materials and their composites, processing, characterisation, product development, and manufacturing process parameter optimisations.