Open Access Books

Developing sustainable organic agriculture and resilient agribusiness sector is fundamental, keeping in mind the value of the opportunity presented by the growing demand for healthy and safe food globally, with the expectation for the global population to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, and 11 billion by 2100.Lately, the main threats in Europe, and worldwide, are the increasingly dynamic climate change and economic factors related to currency fluctuations. While the current environmental policy provides several mechanisms to support agribusinesses in mitigating organic food for daily increasing human population and stability of the currency, it does not contemplate the relative readiness of individuals and businesses to act correctly.Organic farming is the practice that relies more on using sustainable methods to cultivate crops and produce food animals, avoiding chemicals and dietary synthetic drug inputs that do not belong to the natural ecosystem. Organic agriculture can also contribute to meaningful socioeconomic, ecologically sustainable development, and significantly in the development of the agribusiness sector, especially in developing countries.

Generationen von Fotografinnen und Fotografen aus der Schweiz und Deutschland machten sich zwischen 1920 und 1980 auf den Weg Richtung Indien: Ihre Bilder vom märchenhaften Wunderland, von Gandhi, von Hunger und Hippies existieren in ihrer ungebrochenen Widersprüchlichkeit bis heute fort.Der Zürcher Verleger und Fotograf Martin Hürlimann inszenierte Ende der 1920er Jahre Indien im Fotobuch und in Kulturzeitschriften als zeitlose Augenweide. Mit einem gewissen Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi geriet zugleich eine ganze Politelite als Akteurin im antikolonialen Widerstand durch zahlreiche Fotografien ins Bewusstsein. Bilder des Hungers wurden ikonisch und prägten insbesondere nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg die Wahrnehmung. Seit den 1960er Jahren bevölkerten Hippies in bunten Gewändern die Seiten der Illustrierten: »Der Trip« war das Ziel und Goa der spirituelle Sehnsuchtsort.Aus diesem Bilderschatz schöpft das Buch eine Kulturgeschichte westlicher Vorstellungen von Entwicklung, Kultur und Modernität im 20. Jahrhundert und legt dar wie diese im deutschsprachigen Raum in Bildern Indiens verhandelt wurden.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 2024 IEEE 4th International Conference on Electronic Communications, Internet of Things, and Big Data (IEEE ICEIB 2024). This conference was organized by Tamkang University, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Institute of Knowledge Innovation and Invention (IIKII), and was held at Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan, on 19–21 April 2024. The conference provided a unified communication platform for researchers covering a wide range of topics, such as Big Data and Cloud Computing, technologies and applications of Artificial Intelligence, robotics science and engineering, and sensor technology. In recent years, the rapid development of electronic and microelectronic technologies has brought about a novel and universal revolution in technology. Electronics and communications engineering involve information and communication systems, electronics science and technology, signal and information processing circuits and systems, electromagnetic fields and microwave technology, optoelectronics, etc. The analysis and application of Big Data can be used to improve the efficiency of existing products and allow for the development of new products. Recent technological breakthroughs have greatly reduced the cost of data storage and computing, making the storage of huge amounts of data considerably less complicated and expensive. With the increasing volume of data being stored, coupled with lower costs and easier access, the use of Big Data enables leaders to make more precise business decisions that were difficult to make previously.

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

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Satellite positioning techniques, particularly global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), are capable of measuring small changes of the Earths shape and atmosphere, as well as surface characteristics with an unprecedented accuracy. This book is devoted to presenting recent results and development in satellite positioning technique and applications, including GNSS positioning methods, models, atmospheric sounding, and reflectometry as well their applications in the atmosphere, land, oceans and cryosphere. This book provides a good reference for satellite positioning techniques, engineers, scientists as well as user community.

Are German music-based radio stations really converging and offering the same kind of content? Is there actually no difference between the stations? Do their content and music really appeal to their target group? And does the perfect flow of music exist? ‘German-Format Radio Analysis’ is written for scheduling and music managers and goes deep into radio research and programming. It focuses on content and flow and presents new methods of analysing rotations and flows of music. The author, Harald Heckl, has been an employee at different radio stations for decades and is known as a critic of decreasing content on the radio and of computer-based music programming.

A little-known fact about the prominent US psychologist and educator Carl E. Seashore (1866–1949) is that he was deeply involved in the American eugenics movement. He was among the US academics to support eugenics long before German Nazis embraced it. A titan in a host of disciplines and a proponent of radical education reform, Seashore used his positional power to promote a constellation of education reforms consistent with central precepts of eugenics. Many of these reforms, including tracking, gifted and talented programs, and high-stakes standardized testing, were adopted and remain standard practice in the United States today. He promulgated the idea that musical talent is biologically inheritable, and he developed the first standardized tests of musical talent; these tests were used by early-twentieth-century researchers in their attempts to determine whether there are race differences in musical talent. Seashore’s ideas and work profoundly shaped music education’s research trajectory, as well as enduring “commonsense” beliefs about musical ability. An intersectional analysis, “Destined to Fail” focuses on the relationship between eugenics and Seashore’s views on ability, race, and gender. Koza concludes that Seashore promoted eugenics and its companion, euthenics, because he was a true believer. She also discusses the longstanding silences surrounding Seashore’s participation in eugenics. As a diagnosis and critique of the present, “Destined to Fail” identifies resemblances and connections between past and present that illustrate the continuing influence of eugenics—and the systems of reasoning that made early-twentieth-century eugenics imaginable and seem reasonable—on education discourse and practice today. It maps out discursive, citational, and funding connections between eugenicists of the early twentieth-century and contemporary White supremacists; this mapping leads to some of Donald Trump’s supporters and appointees.

This Frontiers Research Topic on ‘Neural Circuits: Japan’ explores the diversity of neural circuit research occurring across Japan by innovative researchers using cutting-edge approaches. This issue has brought together papers revealing the development, structure, and physiology of neuronal circuits involved in sensory perception, sleep and wakefulness, behavioral selection, and motor command generation in a range of species from the nematode to the primate. Like the USA and Europe, Japan is now making a strong effort to elucidate neural circuit function in diverse organisms by taking advantages of optogenetics and innovative approaches for gene manipulation, traditional physiological and anatomical approaches, and neural pathway-selective inactivation techniques that have recently been developed in Japan.

This entry explores the implications of growing complexity of global governance on business behaviour through the lens of international regime complex theory. It demonstrates how complexity provides opportunities for businesses to influence global governance through sponsoring and inhibiting existing public regulations in their interest, or providing regulation in lieu of the state. It draws from International Regime Complexity theory, which centers around institutional complexity and interactions. While originally developed as a state-centric theory; IRC theory offers a useful starting point to explore the opportunities complexity creates for the role of businesses in international regulation and their consequences for business compliance. Based on IRC theory, we identify the main theoretical mechanisms and pathways through which these roles become manifest. We illustrate our argument through the example of the global anti-money laundering regime complex, where business actors have employed the sponsor and provider roles to shape the regulation and in turn, their compliance obligations.

How can we make sense of the persistent political instability in Guinea-Bissau, a small country that has hosted extensive international interventions and made world news headlines over several decades? This book tackles this question, arguing for the need to understand politics in Guinea-Bissau as intricately linked to and deeply embedded in transnational, regional and trans-regional dynamics. Taking a multidimensional approach, the book brings together international scholars who have studied politics in Guinea-Bissau and Africa for many years, at different levels and from diverse perspectives. Together, the contributors provide an up-to-date analysis of crucial actors and processes, whilst also putting them in historical perspective. The volume connects the study of politics in Guinea-Bissau to a range of empirical phenomena and theoretical debates that have wider relevance far beyond its borders. In this way, it enables a better understanding of regional and international politics, demonstrating how apparently marginal cases are not marginal at all, but are actively entangled in broader multi-dimensional politics. With important new perspectives and insights both on Guinea-Bissau, and wider regional dynamics, this book will be an important read for researchers and policy makers involved in African politics and security issues

This collection includes the peer-reviewed papers presented during the 2016 Australian Summer Study on Energy Productivity.

The volume comprises a selection of papers presented at the 6th Postgraduate International Conference organized by the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Venice, 9-11 October 2024): In my End is my Beginning. Dialectical Images in Times of Crisis. Both in the past and the present, humanity has been witnessing the collapse of its own identity, sociopolitical system and cultural order, as well as their restoration. In this imbalance, Ernesto De Martino acknowledges the roots of crisis, elaborating how the end of the world represents the culmination of the issue of existence, caught between the risk of downfall and the quest for redemption. At that moment, an apocalypse happens to reveal when a specific order needs to be replaced by new symbolic formations that correspond to the changed Zeitgeist. The vitality of an apocalyptic thinking, which continually transforms and produces new images of the crisis, leads us to consider a dimension in which the clash between the past and the future creates a generative power. In this liminal space between different meanings of ‘crisis’ and their translation into images, it is fundamental to consider what Walter Benjamin conceptualized as a dialectical image, a fragment wherein “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (Arcades Project, 1999, 462).The 6th Postgraduate International Conference was aimed at investigating the liminal space between different meanings of ‘crisis’ and ‘apocalypse’, discovering how, through multiple processes of translation into images, these notions reveal new, unexpected beginnings. This volume therefore investigates the image as a representation of this dialectical moment.

Is democracy hazardous to the health of the environment? Addressing this and related questions, Bob Pepperman Taylor analyzes contemporary environmental political thought in America. He begins with the premise that environmental thinking is necessarily political thinking because environmental problems, both in their cause and effect, are collective problems. They are also problems that signal limits to what the environment can tolerate. Those limits directly challenge orthodox democratic theory, which encourages expanding individual and political freedoms and is predicated on growth and abundance in our society. Balancing the competing needs of the natural world and the polity, Taylor asserts, must become the heart of the environmental debate.Contemporary environmental thinking derives, according to Taylor, from two wellestablished traditions in American political thought. The pastoral tradition, which he traces from Thoreau through John Muir to today's deep ecology, biocentrism, and Green movement, appeals to moral lessons that nature can teach us. The progressive tradition—which he traces from Gifford Pinchot to the apostate neomalthusians (who reject the commitment to democratic equality) and liberal theorists like Roderick Nash, Christopher Stone, and Mark Sagoff—focuses on the role that nature plays in supporting a liberal democratic society. This analysis sidesteps the usual anthropocentricbiocentric formulation of the debate, which tends to center on the most appropriate conception of nature abstractly considered, and reorients the discussion to a consideration of the relationship between our political and environmental values. If we are to stem the thoughtless pillaging of the environment, Taylor contends, that's where the changes must occur.Any satisfactory resolution of the tension between the garden and the machine must draw upon the best of both the pastoral and progressive traditions, Taylor concludes. The best of pastoralism teaches us that any reform must challenge the human arrogance and crude materialism that permeates much of liberal society. In addition to Nash, Stone, and Sagoff, Taylor discusses other contemporary thinkers such as Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, Robert Heilbroner, William Ophuls, Julian Simon, Robert Paehlke, J. Donald Moon, Kirkpatrick Sale, J. Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston, Paul Taylor, Barry Commoner, and Murray Bookchin.

The ancient city of Perinthos (Marmaraereglisi/Tekirdag/Istanbul), where researched with a systematic multidisciplinary archaeological project were initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2021, has the potential to accommodate both marine and land-based multidiscipline studies in a comprehensive approach. To investigate the traces of archaeological remains, an integrated geophysical survey was designed. As part of the project, a comprehensive multi-beam bathymetry study was carried out in the city's offshore zones, while geophysical studies were carried out on land. The bathymetry study aims to model and investigate the detailed seafloor morphology of the coast of the Perinthos. The seafloor morphology modelled using high-precision data gave us a unique opportunity to investigate the mysteries of the ancient city of Perinthos. Multi-beam bathymetry data in over 1000 hectare acquired with 400 and 700 kHz central frequency sensors. Throughout the data processing procedure, the ¨International Hydrographic Organization Standards for Hydrographic Survey¨ were adhered to. Finally, morphological imagery of the seafloor was obtained. The resolution of these images, varies between 10 cm and 1 meter depending on the depth. This study is a significant contribution to the high-resolution identification of ancient cultural heritage through the multi-beam bathymetry in marine archaeological sites.