Open Access Books

A coherent and comprehensive theory of life that synthesizes the specific properties of living organisms.Despite continued advances, science has until now struggled to describe the specific properties that define a living being. By synthesizing several aspects of organismic biology and contemporary science, Properties of Life by Bernd Rosslenbroich generates a coherent concept of the singular quality of being alive—a concept that provides a crucial foundation for scientists, farmers, and medical practitioners and helps explain how we all interact with the world around us and within ourselves. Is an organism an aggregate of parts or an integrated system with agency? Is it a passive stimulus-response machine or a being equipped with subjectivity and consciousness? Rosslenbroich argues that the way people in different fields understand life determines their assumptions about organic function and behavior. In medicine, this extends to the human organism, which influences prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Drawing attention to a long-standing but underappreciated line of thought in organismic biology, Rosslenbroich's original idea emphasizes the autonomy of living processes, their network characteristics, and their self-determined organization in time and structure. A timely and revelatory book, Properties of Life formulates an integrated, unified theory that remains flexible enough to accommodate future developments and resilient enough to withstand the challenges of different theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds.

Si l'histoire religieuse des populations littorales a suscité de nombreux travaux, elle a souvent omis d'étudier les expressions de la foi des hommes embarqués en mer. Les périples nautiques ne sont pourtant pas une ellipse temporelle hors de l'histoire : les navigations hauturières durent longtemps et bien des missionnaires embarqués forgèrent leur foi dans l'épreuve des flots. Ajoutons que la charge des âmes à bord soulève quantité de préventions historiques, qu'il s'agisse de l'encadrement religieux, lorsque le commandement lui-même se fait ministre du culte ; ou qu'il s'agisse de la délivrance des sacrements, en particulier quand la mort emporte les marins, alors qu'il est impossible de maintenir les rituels de deuil tels qu'ils sont pratiqués à terre. In fine, c'est le statut même du voyage en religion qu'il convient de questionner : l'histoire des religions méditerranéennes ne file-t-elle pas ses principaux motifs et sa doctrine sur un imaginaire nautique ? Le navire lui-même, artefact sacré en Occident, mérite une étude approfondie des réalités spirituelles de la navigation. Cet ouvrage ouvre donc des pistes qui croisent les pratiques cultuelles en mer avec les cultures religieuses. Pour nous rappeler que la mer est aussi un désert, au sens spirituel du terme.

The book is divided into six sections. The first three sections focus on the pathophysiology of the disease, showing anatomo- and histopathological aspects, experimental models and signaling pathways and programmed cell death related to pheochromocytoma. The fourth discusses some specific aspects of clinical presentation, with emphasis on clinical manifestations of headache and heart. The fifth section focuses on clinical diagnosis, laboratory and imaging, including differential diagnosis. Finally, the last section discusses the treatment of pheochromocytoma showing clinical cases, a case about undiagnosed pheochromocytoma complicated with multiple organ failure and other cases about catecholamine-secreting hereditary tumors. Thus, this book shows the disease "pheochromocytoma" in a different perspective from the traditional approach. Enjoy your reading.

In natural environments, the auditory system is typically confronted with a mixture of sounds originating from different sound sources. As sounds spread over time, the auditory system has to continuously decompose competing sounds into distinct meaningful auditory objects or “auditory streams” referring to certain sound sources. This decomposition work, which was termed by Albert Bregman as “Auditory scene analysis” (ASA), involves two kinds of grouping to be done. Grouping based on simultaneous cues, such as harmonicity and on sequential cues, such as similarity in acoustic features over time. Understanding how the brain solves these tasks is a fundamental challenge facing auditory scientist. In recent years, the topic of ASA was broadly investigated in different fields of auditory research, including a wide range of methods, studies in different species, and modeling. Despite the advance in understanding ASA, it still proves to be a major challenge for auditory research. This includes verifying whether experimental findings are transferable to more realistic auditory scenes. A central approach in understanding ASA is the use of certain stimulus parameters that produce an ambiguous percept. The advantage of such an approach is that different perceptual organizations can be studied without varying physical stimulus parameters. Additionally, the perception of ambiguous stimuli can be volitionally controlled by intention or task. By using this one can mirror real hearing situations where listeners intent to identify and to localize auditory sources. Recently it was also found that in classical auditory streaming sequences perceptual ambiguity was not restricted to but was observed over a broad range of stimulus parameters. The proposed Research Topic pursues to bring together scientist in the different fields of auditory research whose work addresses the issue of perceptual ambiguity. Researchers were welcome to contribute experimental reports, computational modeling, and reviews that consider auditory ambiguity in its modality specific characteristics as well as in comparison to visual ambiguous figures. The overall goal of contributions was to consider the experimental findings from the perspective of real auditory scenes. In a broader sense, the Research Topic was open for contributions which are related to the issue of active listening in complex scenes.

Rodbina Gall in njene veje v srednjem veku je celostna zgodovinska študija o plemiški rodbini z genealoškega in posestno-zgodovinskega vidika. Obravnava eno pomembnejših plemiških rodbin v srednjeveškem slovenskem prostoru, katere zgodovina je prvič v celoti obravnavana na podlagi vseh ohranjenih oziroma poznanih in dostopnih originalnih zgodovinskih virov.Galli izvirajo iz Bavarske, od koder so se v začetku 13. stoletja pod okriljem andeških grofov preselili na Kranjsko. Iz prvotnih posestnih jeder na Gamberku in Mekinjah se je rodbina v teku naslednjih treh stoletij razcepila v več vej (Gallenberg, Gall-Lebek, Gall-Rožek, Gall-Gallenstein, Gall-Motnik, Gall-Pukštajn), ki so s širitvijo posesti pridobile nadzor nad večjim delom Zasavja ter posegle tudi na Dolenjsko in Štajersko. Ves srednji vek so ohranjali stik z aktualnim vojaškim, političnim in kulturnim dogajanjem v regiji ter v službi vsakokratnih ključnih akterjev (Andeških, Spanheimov, Oglejskih patriarhov, Goriško-Tirolskih, Goriških, Habsburžanov in Celjskih) sooblikovali zgodovino slovenskega prostora.

Le suicide frappe partout et à tous les âges, de l'enfance à la vieillesse. On connaît pourtant fort mal ce phénomène encore tabou. Qu'en est-il exactement ? Pourquoi, en fin de compte, décide-t-on de mettre un terme à sa vie ? Y a-t-il des différences entre pays ? Des différences entre les hommes et les femmes ? Des groupes à risque ? Est-ce que la dépression, l'alcool, les abus et les négligences familiales peuvent être perçus comme des facteurs de risque ? Qu'est-ce qui distingue, le suicide de l'euthanasie et du suicide assisté ? Voici quelques-unes des questions qui sont au cœur de cet ouvrage. Comprendre le suicide pour mieux le prévenir, c'est aussi un des enjeux soulevés par les auteurs qui préconisent une vraie concertation entre les chercheurs, les intervenants et les familles. Finalement, c'est à notre responsabilité collective face à la souffrance que les deux spécialistes font appel devant une question dont l'enjeu éthique reste entier.

Face aux bouleversements profonds qui affectent les techniques d’apprentissage, les méthodes de travail, le style de vie des jeunes et l’offre documentaire elle-même, cet ouvrage ouvre des pistes et montre à travers des exemples concrets comment les bibliothèques peuvent être des partenaires actifs et incontournables pour favoriser la réussite des étudiants. La présentation de formations innovantes, de réalisations réussies, d’expérimentations en cours en France mais aussi à l’étranger ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives pour remplir cette mission dans un contexte de partenariat renforcé et renouvelé avec les enseignants-chercheurs. Les professionnels des bibliothèques trouveront dans ce manuel des axes de réflexion mais aussi l’exposé de situations concrètes qui les aideront à s’interroger sur leur offre de service, leur politique documentaire et les stratégies à développer pour favoriser la réussite étudiante.

By analysing various conflicts, this book discusses the social, political, economic and legal attributes that are attached to the practice of traditional (communal) marine tenure. Selling the Sea pushes the discourse beyond the conventional approach which looks at marine tenure only as a means of resource management, and offers a more comprehensive understanding of what marine tenure is. For those working in the areas of marine resource management and fisheries, this book is a critical but also complementary reading to the conventional discourse on the issue.

À la fin du Moyen Âge, un véritable thermalisme prit essor en Toscane. De nombreuses sources chaudes et minérales furent captées et utilisées à des fins essentiellement thérapeutiques. Dans les campagnes, des bains - c'est-à-dire des bassins - furent aménagés et plusieurs stations thermales se formèrent pour abriter les curistes comme tous ceux qui se destinaient à les héberger, à les nourrir ou à les soigner lors de leur séjour. En prenant appui essentiellement sur la documentation des archives siennoises et lucquoises, cet ouvrage se propose d'étudier les formes de ce développement thermal : les caractéristiques et l'importance de l'habitat et des activités thermales, l'aspect des infrastructures balnéaires, le rôle des autorités communales (urbaines ou rurales) dans la mise en valeur et l'exploitation des eaux chaudes et des espaces thermaux, l'intérêt, enfin, des populations citadines pour des pratiques médicales et récréatives nouvelles et pour les profits du thermalisme.

The manual construction of formal domain conceptualizations (ontologies) is labor-intensive. Ontology learning, by contrast, provides (semi-)automatic ontology generation from input data such as domain text. This thesis proposes a novel approach for learning labels of non-taxonomic ontology relations. It combines corpus-based techniques with reasoning on Semantic Web data. Corpus-based methods apply vector space similarity of verbs co-occurring with labeled and unlabeled relations to calculate relation label suggestions from a set of candidates. A meta ontology in combination with Semantic Web sources such as DBpedia and OpenCyc allows reasoning to improve the suggested labels. An extensive formal evaluation demonstrates the superior accuracy of the presented hybrid approach.

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Department of Defense (DoD) installations rely on the commercial electricity grid for 99 percent of their electricity needs, but the U.S. electricity grid is vulnerable to disruption from natural hazards and actor-induced outages, such as physical or cyber attacks. Using portfolio analysis methods for assessing capability options, this paper presents a framework to evaluate choices among energy security strategies for DoD installations.

At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience. Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Defined positively, sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. These possibilities converge in the work of Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has explored the subject of sleep systematically throughout his career. In examining Apichatpong’s work, Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutors—from Freud to Proust, George Méliès to Tsai Ming-liang, Weegee to Warhol—to rethink moving images through the lens of sleep. Ma exposes an affinity between cinema, spectatorship, and sleep that dates to the earliest years of filmmaking, and sheds light upon the shifting cultural valences of sleep in the present moment. “Moving with ease across historical contextualization, theoretical inquiry, and the close reading of films and other cultural objects, Jean Ma takes on urgent contemporary debates pertaining to corporeality, slowness, attention, and cinematic relocation. A true pleasure to read.” — ERIKA BALSOM, author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation “Intellectually ambitious, erudite across a number of fields, poetically written yet lucid, and both historically informed and deeply attuned to our own moment.” — KAREN REDROBE, author of Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis “Downright groundbreaking in its far-ranging and far-reaching insights.” — DANA POLAN, Cinema Studies, New York University

Volume Mundus Slavicus I contains materials from the International Student-Doctoral Scientific Conference (Łódź, 15–16 November 2024). The articles comprising this publication, like the themes of the 2024 symposium, are highly interdisciplinary in nature. They reflect the broad spectrum of research interests of their authors, focusing on various aspects of Mundus Slavicus. In addition to considerations on Slavic languages and literatures, the reader will find in the post-conference volume works devoted to issues of history, political science, memory studies, regional studies, and translation studies.