Open Access Books

The videogame is the emblematic contemporary medium that invite to think about man's new ways of making knowledge and experience of the world. Video-gaming means for the user to access the writing of a spatial narrative, consisting of virtual environments to navigate, actions to perform, and multimedia representations to interact with. Today, the videogame is also beginning to be adopted in museum institutions, which are experimenting innovative languages in order to actualize their own way of telling the artworks and collections, offering more interactive experiences appropriate for new cultural audiences. To ignore this new narrative mode would mean for museums to create a barrier towards a large audience and, consequently, to hinder the cultural and communicative action they are called upon to provide. The videogame, in fact, can become a tool capable of increasing museum accessibility: the digital one, through the use of everyday technologies; the cognitive one, by reducing the sense of cultural inadequacy and emotional detachment for those audiences, especially younger ones, who do not identify with traditional methods of cultural transmission and who are stimulated by experiences guided by factors such as discovery, free exploration, interaction and immersion; and the physical-perceptual one, as it is capable of creating new forms of relationship between virtual game space and physical museum space. The book therefore reflects on the need to deal more methodically and systematically with the spatial narrative model used in the new medium, making visual procedural maps for its aware use in both Entertainment Games and Cultural Games. The research analyzes the virtual game space as a device for organizing narrative elements that can activate important parts of the player's interpretive process, as a tool for constructing museum-related stories and creating innovative experiences of Cultural Heritage fruition.

Die dynamische Erforschung von Internationalisierungsprozessen wurde bisher nur unzureichend vorangetrieben. Gleichwohl bemühen sich das Internationale Management und das Corporate Finance um einen Brückenschlag. Diese Arbeit beinhaltet einen ganzheitlichen Ansatz und eine integrative Analyse des langfristigen Internationalisierungsprozesses und der Finanzstrategie. Die empirische Langzeitanalyse untersucht die Internationalisierung und das «Gearing» in einem Zeitraum von über 15 Jahren; die qualitative und explorative Studie identifiziert mittels der Methodik der Bilanzanalyse fünf Verlaufstypen und stellt eine proaktive Steuerung des Kapitalbedarfs durch den wellenförmigen Gearing-Verlauf fest. Zwei Fallbeispiele illustrieren diese interdependente Beziehung.

Illegal content remains a persistent and growing issue on the internet. This book reviews seven problematic areas - defamation, hate speech, terrorist content, copyright, counterfeit, unsafe products and food - to illustrate that the fight against unlawful content on online platforms in the EU is hampered by fragmented and outdated laws. Meanwhile, the global internet companies that govern our digital spaces enforce their own policies, based on commercial objectives, and with secondary regard for public values and individuals’ rights. The book subsequently charts out a solution of how EU lawmakers can bring social media and the like to take on adequate responsibilities for protecting users and public interests. The author argues that a safety-by-design approach, supported by technical standards, can be an effective way for implementing these new duties. Carsten Ullrich is a legal researcher at the University of Luxembourg, where he works on the regulation of digital technologies. The doctoral thesis on which this book is based was awarded the Rolf Tarrach Prize 2021 for the best dissertation in Luxembourg.

This chapter offers a succinct survey of the reception of classical monsters in children’s and young adult literature with the aim of indicating the main ways in which this kind of content is adapted to the needs of the young public. The focus is on presenting the monsters’ reception as a key for understanding the transformations underway in societal sensitivity, as well as one for enabling intergenerational communication and fostering psychological and intellectual maturation in the transition from childhood to adulthood. The basic theoretical remarks are exemplified by a choice of case studies along with an outline of the major methodological challenges intrinsic to research into this aspect of the reception of classical antiquity.

Si, à l'origine, les maladies du corps et de l'esprit possédaient chacune leur autonomie, si elles connurent ensuite au xixe siècle un rapprochement conduisant à la neuropsychiatrie, la déflagration de mai 1968 contribua à les isoler de nouveau. L'émergence des sciences cognitives, et d'un esprit radicalement interdisciplinaire, a fait éclater ces replis dogmatique. C'est bien là l'esprit des neurosciences cognitives, où l'émotion et la cognition constituent deux phénomènes tellement rapprochés et intriqués que leur séparation, si elle peut garder un intérêt au niveau de l'enseignement et de la pratique, n'a plus de sens au niveau de l'identification des mécanismes physiopathologiques. Leurs moyens d'investigation sont les mêmes, qu'il s'agisse de l'imagerie cérébrale, de la génétique cognitive, de la modélisation, voire de la cognition sociale. On verra dans cet ouvrage une illustration répétée de l'intrication de ces deux disciplines lorsqu'il s'agit de s'intéresser aux dysfonctionnements qu'elles étudient l'une et l'autre. C'est bien ici le mérite du programme Cognitique d'avoir su fédérer des communautés à l'origine isolées pour créer une nouvelle mouvance de recherche.

"This research project examines how various political events and factors influence the composition of senior government elites in a range of African states. Using a newly created dataset of African cabinet ministers, this thesis creates a number of metrics to measure elite volatility and ethnic, regional and political representation. These metrics are used to assess leader and regime strategies of elite power-sharing. It then employs a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate how factors such as ethnic demography, regime strength, economic performance, opposition cohesion and popular unrest influence these metrics. Through this process the thesis aims to demonstrate how the distribution of political power within a state can be estimated by allocation and reshuffling of cabinet ministers. This research project contributes a number of key findings. Firstly, most regimes represent the majority relevant subnational groups within the senior government, but that representation is unbalanced with certain groups being overrepresented and others underrepresented. Secondly, these imbalances and variation in which groups are favoured provide information on the distribution of political power. Thirdly, that different political environments lend themselves to different compositions in the senior government and different strategies of elite power-sharing. In the same vein, individual political events which alter the balance of power are accompanied with corresponding changes in senior government which reflect these shifts in the political hierarchy. These findings contribute to the debates on the determinants of African political power distributions, elite designations and processes, formal vs informal institutions and the political survival literature. A broad benefit of this work is to demonstrate the variance in power sharing arrangements across the African continent. Furthermore, this project demonstrates that external events change leader and elite calculations, which in turn changes strategies of power sharing."

The mixture of data in real-life exhibits structure or connection property in nature. Typical data include biological data, communication network data, image data, etc. Graphs provide a natural way to represent and analyze these types of data and their relationships. Unfortunately, the related algorithms usually suffer from high computational complexity, since some of these problems are NP-hard. Therefore, in recent years, many graph models and optimization algorithms have been proposed to achieve a better balance between efficacy and efficiency. This book contains some papers reporting recent achievements regarding graph models, algorithms, and applications to problems in the real world, with some focus on optimization and computational complexity.

Nem sempre Marx escreve de pontos de vista convergentes, embora tenha sempre no horizonte a perspectiva da revolução que, assim me parece, lhe permite captar, de forma inovadora, as relações sociais do sistema capitalista e as contradições que as atravessam. Mas isso só lhe é possível porque, em contrapartida, recorre a uma lógica que, pretendendo inverter a lógica hegeliana, sem, entretanto tratar das principais questões levantadas por essa inversão, faz com que possa ir além dos limites postos por uma ciência positiva, a despeito de estar a todo momento reiterando profissão de fé nessa ciência.

L'obra de l'escriptor nord-català Jordi Pere Cerdà (1920-2011) una cartografia literària que abasta tota dimensió espacial ―real, imaginada i ficcional. Les prospeccions que assagen els seus texts es fonen en el medi natural i rural, canten a l'amor, als veïns i als éssers fantàstics del folklore català, es comprometen amb els refugiats encarant-se a tota frontera i, també, a tot abisme interior i exterior que oprimesca l’ésser. Aquesta obra s'interessa pels orígens del pensament poètic de Cerdà, en un context agitat, ple de transformacions socioeconòmiques, polítiques, culturals i lingüístiques, en el qual Cerdà desenvoluparà la seua pròpia veu literària. La seua rica experiència vital ens permet, en definitiva, reconstruir una vida dedicada al pensament, a la creació, a l'activisme cultural i al compromís social.

This open access book presents detailed pathways to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2050, globally and across ten geographical regions. Based on state-of-the-art scenario modelling, it provides the vital missing link between renewable energy targets and the measures needed to achieve them. Bringing together the latest research in climate science, renewable energy technology, employment and resource impacts, the book breaks new ground by covering all the elements essential to achieving the ambitious climate mitigation targets set out in the Paris Climate Agreement. For example, sectoral implementation pathways, with special emphasis on differences between developed and developing countries and regional conditions, provide tools to implement the scenarios globally and domestically. Non-energy greenhouse gas mitigation scenarios define a sustainable pathway for land-use change and the agricultural sector. Furthermore, results of the impact of the scenarios on employment and mineral and resource requirements provide vital insight on economic and resource management implications. The book clearly demonstrates that the goals of the Paris Agreement are achievable and feasible with current technology and are beneficial in economic and employment terms. It is essential reading for anyone with responsibility for implementing renewable energy or climate targets internationally or domestically, including climate policy negotiators, policy-makers at all levels of government, businesses with renewable energy commitments, researchers and the renewable energy industry.

This book is the result of the First Ukulele International Conference (UIC 2021) – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Performance, Composition, and Organology (December 3-4, 2021), the first academic event ever dedicated to the instrument. The edited volume collects selected essays and contributions by authors with different (or with multiple) professional backgrounds: researchers in the ukulele’s cultural history, musicologists with scholarship in performance and instrumentality issues, composers (or composer-performers) of music for ukulele, performers engaged in scholarly research and in popularizing the instrument, and professionals involved in the technological innovation of the instrument. The purpose of this book is to provide a sample of possible questions related to the instrument, with the awareness that many others may only be fully formulated in future research. In addition to the general tenet of interdisciplinarity—crucial for addressing an instrument endowed with such high and intrinsic "plasticity"—the book presents a further challenge: extending research on the ukulele to research with the ukulele, namely understanding it as an instrument (in a more etymological sense), a scientific tool to investigate different topics in music-making.

Rooted in years of interdisciplinary research and collaboration, the chapters in this book highlight the central role of differential equations in describing how systems evolve across science and engineering while emphasizing the modern need to connect theory with data and computation. It bridges rigorous mathematical foundations with the practical challenges of modeling and inference, demonstrating how data assimilation refines models using observations and how advanced numerical algorithms enable the study of complex systems beyond analytical reach. By addressing the interplay between models, data, and computation, the book equips advanced students, researchers, and practitioners with the understanding and tools needed to apply differential equations meaningfully in contemporary scientific inquiry.

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

# This is an e-book. What is a book? How is it set to evolve in the digital age? In May 2018, researchers and practitioners from a wide range of fields (design, publishing, communication, literature, and more) gathered in Montreal for the ÉCRIDIL conference to assess the current state of affairs and propose possible solutions. The result of a publishing experiment conducted in parallel with the event, this book is a fragmented and reasoned index of the notes taken collectively during the discussions. Its creation relies on digital tools that enable a new form of publishing workflow—one that is collaborative, hybrid, and open both in time and space. What you are reading here is “Version 0” of a book that is open to future additions and reconfigurations.

The purpose of this study is to perform the life cycle assessment (LCA) limited to life cycle inventory (LCI) related to municipal solid waste operating in Kosodrza, community of Ostrów, in Poland. The current LCI is a representative for year 2015 by application of PN-EN ISO 14040. The system boundary was labeled as gate-to-gate. The data used in this study, involving consumption of energy and fuels, water, materials, and waste, is obtained from (i) site-specific measured or calculated data and (ii) secondary data taken from integrated permit issued by Marshal of the Podkarpackie region in Rzeszów for the establishment of municipal services in Ostrów by entering the records concerning the waste landfill in Kosodrza. This study is based on the deterministic approach to LCI. Hence, uncertainty analysis is not carried out. The LCI model can be used in full LCA study.