Open Access Books
Reference documents in Open Access Books.
Documents in Open Access Books
Page 2066 of 2902-
Elaborating with the concepts of culture and religious literacy, this volume examines theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects of the practice and study of religion and non-religion, culture, spirituality and worldviews within healthcare. In modern multi-cultural and multi-religious societies, a host of new issues have arisen concerning culture, religion and spirituality within healthcare, especially when people face serious and life-limiting illness. Healthcare professionals are faced with challenges addressing and handling patients’ cultural expressions of religiosity, spirituality and existential concerns. The variety needs to be met without essentializing the concepts of culture and religion, and with an ability to include the non-religious as well as new types of spiritualities. This collection reflects on the tension between cultural, religious and spiritual dimensions of care in a secularized healthcare institution and describes implications of this tension for healthcare professionals and patients. The book engages with an ongoing scholarly discussion about religious literacy in healthcare, and contributes perspectives, experiences and empirical examples from the Nordic countries, especially Sweden. It gives suggestions for practical application of research to healthcare practice, highlighting challenges and ideas for how to integrate religious, non-religious, and spiritual dimensions in care. This is an important contribution to the literature on religious literacy and provides a vital reference for students, scholars and healthcare professionals with an interest in the complex relationship between culture, spirituality, and religion in healthcare. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
-
This monograph presents an in-depth study of how universities are leveraging their role as key players in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It begins with the context of Ukraine, namely the impact of the war on academic potential, an analysis of a wide range of socio-economic, socio-psychological, professional and personal challenges that arose during the war. To overcome these challenges, a roadmap for systemic reforms and the development of a sustainable institutional ecosystem is proposed based on the triple helix model, which combines people-centric and infrastructural strategies. The following narrative builds on this foundation, exploring the theme of inclusiveness and accessibility in education. In particular, it examines how Ukrainian higher education institutions implemented adaptive strategies during the ongoing war to create a barrier-free environment, thus ensuring full participation of all students and pedagogical staff. The monograph then moves on to a detailed discussion of the integration of STEM education, emphasizing its vital role in national revitalization and alignment with the global sustainable development goals. This chapter shows how STEM education can be a powerful catalyst for societal transformation, equipping students with the skills they need to meet current and future challenges. In addition, the text delves into the specialized field of nanotechnology education, advocating the synergy of education, science, and values. This innovative approach reconciles technological progress with ethical standards and sustainable practice, marking it as a new paradigm for training a highly skilled and responsible professional. Ultimately, the themes are synthesized through the harmonization of institutional culture, values, university development strategies and the Sustainable Development Goals. The case study of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University, which adopted the "University without walls" model during the war, shows how the introduction of core values into the university's mission can contribute to the development of a sustainable institutional ecosystem and more global motives in the development of communities and society. Overall, the monograph not only outlines the challenges Ukrainian higher education faced during the war, but also highlights innovative responses and the critical role these institutions play in promoting sustainable development. It aims to provide a roadmap for other educational institutions, demonstrating that even in times of crisis, higher education can and should be a beacon of hope and progress, a key driver in promoting sustainable development.
-
Evans-Pritchard was perhaps the most influential anthropological scholar of the twentieth century. His extraordinary work in Africa has formed a central foundation to anthropological thought since the 1930s, with generations of anthropologists having read and appreciated his ethnographies of the Azande, Nuer and Sanusi, and his analyses of social structures, belief systems and history. And yet, though so much has been written about his work, a rounded understanding of the person has proved elusive. This volume covers Evans-Pritchard as a promising student, a young graduate in search of career opportunities, an adventurous cultural explorer, a determined officer in the Second World War, and an ambitious department-building professor with a global reputation. Against a glittering array of contexts and characters - from Malinowski to Marett to the Maharaj of Kutch; from Oxford poets and pubs to Catholic conversion in war-torn Libya - there emerges a fascinating study of a figure who was much more than an innovative anthropologist. A portrait of the man and his time is composed from personal correspondence, archives and familial recollections, contributions from surviving friends and students, and accounts by those, including contemporary African scholars, who continue to debate and re-evaluate his work in all its complexity. This book is a fitting monument to Evans-Pritchard's legacy and a landmark in anthropological historiography.
-
L’éventail des articles qui ont examiné les problématiques liées à la traduction est particulièrement large : du point de vue chronologique, puisqu’ils intéressent des pratiques observées depuis l’époque suméro-akkadienne (ier millénaire avant J.-C.) jusqu’au xxe siècle ; du point de vue typologique, dans le sens où ils concernent des textes religieux, littéraires, médicaux, des récits de voyage ou des manuels d’acquisition des langues étrangères comme des documents épigraphiques de l’Antiquité romaine ; enfin les objectifs qui sous-tendaient leur existence étaient aussi bien scientifiques que politiques et, dans tous les cas, les enjeux dépassaient largement le simple souci de trouver le mot juste et le désir de toucher un public autre que celui de la « langue source ».
-
The present reprint provides some theoretical results (and their applications) in the fields of mathematical analysis and functional analysis, in which the concept of symmetry plays an essential role. More specifically, various problems are investigated in areas, such as: optimization problems, polynomial approximation on unbounded subsets, moment problems, variational inequalities, evolutionary problems, dynamical systems, generalized convexity, partial differential equations, and special spaces of self-adjoint operators. With various examples and applications to complement and substantiate the mathematical developments, the present reprint is a valuable guide for researchers, engineers, and students in the field of mathematics, operations research, optimal control science, artificial intelligence, management science, and economics.
-
Ensuring microbiological safety in the food (of animal origin) chain is a challenging task due to the complex interactions among animals, humans and the environment. However, technological and analytical advances in recent years have provided a broader insight into microbiological hazards in the food chain and risk assessment. The objective of the proposed Special Issue “Study of Microbiological Safety in the Food Chain” was therefore to obtain scientific papers addressing microbiological hazards in the food chain, such as bacterial antimicrobial resistance, bacterial or fungal spoilage of foods, the antimicrobial potential of the indigenous microbiota, the aminogenic or amine-reducing capacity of the microbiota, and papers that apply novel methods to study the food microbiome to discover potential, previously unknown microbial hazards. This Special Issue of the journal Processes entitled “Study of Microbiological Safety in the Food Chain” consists of nine research papers and one review paper. Four papers focus on the microbiological aspects of milk and dairy products, three on meat and meat products, two on eggs, and one on various market foods. The microorganisms of interest were species of lactobacilli, enterococci and molds, Yersinia enterocolitica, Bacillus cereus and the general microbiota in certain foods.
-
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of our everyday lives – from the political to the economic to the social. Using a multimodal discourse analysis approach, this dynamic collection examines various discourses, modes and media in circulation during the early stages of the pandemic, and how these have impacted our daily lives in terms of the various meanings they express. Examples include how national and international news organisations communicate important information about the virus and the crisis, the public’s reactions to such communications, the resultant (counter-)discourses as manifested in social media posts and memes, as well as the impact social distancing policies and mobility restrictions have had on people’s communication and interaction practices. The book offers a synoptic view of how the pandemic was communicated, represented and (re-)contextualised across different spheres, and ultimately hopes to help account for the significant changes we are continuing to witness in our everyday lives as the pandemic unfolds. This volume will appeal primarily to scholars in the field of (multimodal) discourse analysis. It will also be of interest to researchers and graduate students in other fields whose work focuses on the use of multimodal artefacts for communication and meaning making.
-
Speaking to the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, in October 2022, President Xi Jinping reiterated his commitment to the 'opening up' policy of his predecessors — a policy that has burnished the party’s political legitimacy among its citizens by enabling four decades of economic development. Yet, for all the talk of openness, 2022 was a year of both literal and symbolic locks and chains — including, of course, the long, coercive, and often brutally enforced lockdowns of neighbourhoods and cities across China, most prominently Shanghai. Then there was a vlogger’s accidental discovery of the ‘woman in chains’, sparking an anguished, nationwide conversation about human trafficking. That was part of a broader (if frequently censored) conversation about gendered violence and women’s rights, in a year when women’s representation at the highest levels of power, which was already minimal, decreased even further. There was trouble with supply chains and, with the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, in August, island chains as well. Despite the tensions in the Asia-Pacific, the People’s Republic of China expanded its diplomatic initiatives among Pacific island nations and celebrated fifty years of diplomatic links with both Japan and Australia. As the year drew to a close, a tragic fire in a locked-down apartment building in Ürümqi triggered a series of popular protests that brought an end to three years of ‘zero COVID’. The China Story Yearbook: Chains provides informed perspectives on these and other important stories from 2022.
-
Case-systems all over the world exhibit striking similarities. In most lan- guages intransitive subjects (S) receives less overt marking than one of the two transitive arguments (agent-like A or patient-like P); the other one of these two arguments is usually encoded by the same form as S. In some languages the amount of overt marking is identical between S, A, and P. But hardly ever does the S argument receive more overt marking than A or P. Yet there are some languages that do not follow this general pattern. This book is about those languages that behave differently, the marked-S languages. Marked-S languages are well-known to be found in East Africa, where they occur in two different language families, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Sa- haran. They can also be found in North-Western America and the Pacific region. This book is the first investigation of marked S-languages that treats the phenomenon on a global scale. The study examines the functional distribution of the two main case- forms, the form used for S (S-case) and the case-form of the transitive ar- gument which receives less marking (the zero-case). It offers a very fine- grained perspective considering a wide range of constructions. The con- texts in which the case-marking patterns are investigated include nom- inal, existential and locational predication, subjects in special discourse function (e. g. focused constituents), subjects of passives and dependent clauses, as well as the forms used for addressing someone (vocative form) and for using a noun in isolation (citation form). Apart from the functional distribution of case forms, the formal means of marking are also considered. The main focus is on the synchronic de- scription and comparison of marked-S languages, but historical explana- tions for the unusual case-marking pattern are also discussed.
-
The immune system has several effector cells that have main roles in health and diseases. Many people in all countries are suffering from a wide range of diseases that can be cured, controlled, or initiated by immune system cells. One of the main cells is the eosinophil, which has an important role in the immunopathology of several diseases (e.g., allergic reactions and asthma, hypersensitivity reactions, autoimmune diseases, and immunodeficiency diseases). The current book entitled Eosinophils and Their Role in Human Health and Disease focuses on the relationship between eosinophils and diseases, and other related problems. Chapters of the book present applicable and scientific data-based medical science and will be of benefit to all researchers in medical sciences. We hope these chapters can present new approaches to our knowledge of eosinophils.
-
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
-
The debate over the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry. We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity. In Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh investigate an often overlooked factor in the development of today's interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. This book—a follow-up to Band and Katoh's successful 1995 book Interfaces on Trial—examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years. Band and Katoh are longtime advocates for interoperable devices but present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering; and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.
-
Information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) are crucial to our everyday lives. This book brings together a collection of research papers related to the application of IT and IS to address issues at national levels.The first section provides some introductory material relating to IS and future challenges facing IS. The second section considers several diverse applications of IT and IS, ranging from Internet voting to missing person investigations.This volume is suitable for both academics and IT practitioners working in the industry, government, or service-providing sectors.
-
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 open access book explores the rise of new forms of electricity capitalism, examining how evolving energy systems shape energy consumption and access in five different case studies from the global South. Structured in seven chapters, it begins with a clear theoretical and conceptual foundation and is followed by five compelling case studies, grounded in research insights from Zimbabwe, Mexico, Uganda, Indonesia, and Vanuatu. The book concludes with a synthesis of these findings, paving the way for future discussions on energy poverty in the context of electricity capitalism in the Global South.