Open Access Books

Drawing on the ethnographic experience of the contributors, this volume explores the Cultural Models of Nature found in a range of food-producing communities located in climate-change affected areas. These Cultural Models represent specific organizations of the etic categories underlying the concept of Nature (i.e. plants, animals, the physical environment, the weather, humans, and the supernatural). The adoption of a common methodology across the research projects allows the drawing of meaningful cross-cultural comparisons between these communities. The research will be of interest to scholars and policymakers actively involved in research and solution-providing in the climate change arena.

Pesquisadores(as), profissionais de saúde e autoridades sanitárias se organizaram sob a forma de redes de colaboração para tentar entender e dar respostas rápidas aos desafios impostos pela pandemia, formando a Rede CoVida: Ciência, Informação e Solidariedade. Assim, o objetivo deste e-book é sistematizar, sob a forma de textos acadêmicos, o conjunto de conhecimentos produzidos sobre os aspectos biomédicos, clínico-assistenciais, epidemiológicos e sociais da covid-19. Fruto de contínuas reflexões e debates dos(as) pesquisadores(as) e profissionais que compõem a Rede CoVida sobre as mais variadas questões que permeiam a pandemia de COVID-19 em toda a sua complexidade, esse primeiro volume discute os aspectos biológicos do SARS-CoV-2 e da covid-19.

How can videogames portray love and loss? »Games and Bereavement« answers this question by analysing five videogames and conducting a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer offers both theoretical and practical perspectives on videogames and grief and suggests a design model for videogames to include grievers into game development. Overall, she explores how videogames can be used as contemporary medium for personal storytelling.

This open access book re-evaluates the influence of the ancien régime salons, which were the foremost cultural centres in early modern France. Presided over by women, these salons carved out spaces for poetry recitals, performances, and scientific lectures amid polite conversation, enabling mixed-gender intellectual exchange. But what happened when salon attendees were banished from France and exported the salon to a new national audience? How did visitors of different creeds and nationalities share this space? In other words, what happened when the salon model itself went into exile? In A Salon-in-Exile , Annalisa Nicholson explores the translation of the salon from France to England in the late seventeenth century via the first book-length study of the Mazarin salon. Hosted by Hortense Mancini (Duchess of Mazarin) and Charles de Saint-Évremond, the Mazarin circle quickly became one of the most celebrated salons in Europe and the most vibrant Francophone community in London. Across the chapters, Nicholson examines the establishment of the Mazarin salon in 1676 and the activities that it offered – from conversation and gambling to performance and literary collaboration. As a space that brought together the capital’s community of French and European exiles with Restoration London’s elite, the salon fostered engagement with European thought, French literature, and epicurean philosophy. Attending to this oral and written exchange, A Salon-in-Exile provides a new account of co-existence and collaboration in early modern society with analysis of a wide-ranging corpus of letters, memoirs, plays, operas, and essays. By investigating what happens when the model of the salon moved beyond France's borders, Nicholson argues that the salon transformed into a distinctively pan-European space that accommodated its multilingual and multiconfessional membership. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are addressing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities. The specific areas of focus of the research activities are architectures and semantic interoperability, which reliably cover multiple use cases. The goal is to deliver dynamically-configured infrastructure and integration platforms for connected smart objects covering multiple technologies and multiple intelligent artefacts. The IoT-EPI ecosystem has been created with the objective of increasing the impact of the IoT-related European research and innovation, including seven European promising projects on IoT platforms: AGILE, BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, SymbIoTe, bIoTope, and TagItSmart.This white paper provides an insight regarding interoperability in the IoT platforms and ecosystems created and used by IoT-EPI. The scope of this document covers the interoperability aspects, challenges and approaches that cope with interoperability in the current existing IoT platforms and presents some insights regarding the future of interoperability in this context. It presents possible solutions, and a possible IoT interoperability platform architecture.

Hierdie ontleding van die taalstryd op die kampus van die Universiteit Stellenbosch strek vanaf 2003 tot Maart 2018 en put uit ’n verskeidenheid hoofstroom media, maar veral vanuit Afrikaanse dagblaaie – Die Burger, Volksblad en Beeld – wat daagliks minstens 42,6% van die Afrikaanse leserspubliek bereik. Uit die aard van die onderwerp het veral Afrikaanse koerante groot belangstelling getoon en talle berigte oor die US-taalstryd gehad, terwyl dekking daarvan in veral Mail & Guardian, The Star, The Cape Times en die Cape Argus soms kritieser, indringender en objektiewer ondersoek en standpuntstelling bevat het. Dikwels is die taalkwessies so belangrik geag dat dit voorblaaie gehaal het en volgens die oordeel van die redaksie, kommentaar in talle hoofartikels geregverdig het. Ander aktivistiese wapens wat in hierdie taalstryd uitgewys kan word, is appèl op politici, driftige optogte en lokaalbesettings; dreigemente van ekondruk, boikot en selfs wanvoorstellings en uiteindelik geweldpleging, brandstigting en eiendomsvernietiging. Hoewel die verloop van gebeure in hierdie boek oor Afrikaans se stryd om oorlewing op ’n histories-Afrikaanse universiteit vol drama en intrige verloop het en inderwaarheid die aandag van ’n wye leserspubliek verdien (in die woorde van een van die keurders), is dit in die eerste plek ’n wetenskaplike, ontleding van feitelike gebeure rondom ’n verwikkelde taalstryd.

This new edition of Myanmar: Politics, Economy and Society provides a sophisticated yet accessible overview of the key political, economic and social challenges facing contemporary Myanmar and explains the complex historical and ethnic dynamics that have shaped the country. Thoroughly revised, the book analyses the context and tragic consequences of the military coup in February 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic. With clear and incisive contributions from the world’s leading Myanmar scholars, this book assesses the policies and political reforms that have provoked contestation in Myanmar’s recent history and driven both economic and social change. In this context, questions of economic ownership and control and the distribution of natural resources are shown to be deeply informed by long-standing fractures among ethnic and civil-military relations. The chapters analyse the key issues that constrain or expedite societal development in Myanmar and place recent events of national and international significance in the context of its complex history and social relations. The book provides detailed analysis of the coup, which overturned a decade of political and economic reforms and threw the country into chaos. It explains the drivers for the coup, how it has impacted on the country and the future prospects for accountability and justice. Filling a gap in the market, this research textbook and primer will be of interest to upper undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars of Southeast Asian politics, economics and society and to journalists and professionals working within governments, companies and other organisations.

Of the Contract is a version of a text that is as old as any memory, or a form of legal instrument that constitutes the basis of the world in which its terms have been translated. The text remains as open to renewal as that world remains to future alteration, and the terms are both already past, and always yet to come. The notion of the debt that is presented by the contract corresponds to a conception of accountancy and finance that provide a new approach to the contemporary problem of the sense of that external to the terms of human access. A reinterpretation of the philosophical tradition that runs through Levinas and Heidegger to Kant, Of the Contract is also grounded in the medieval tradition that was centered on the notion of “contraction,” and its writing was inspired by forms of life such as those found in the development of monastic constitutions, and the novels of knight errantry. It is also an oblique contribution to the recent discussions on the nature of debt, and is deeply marked by an awareness of climate change, and the insufficiencies of capital to overcome this crisis. All of these concerns however were contracted in a more acute awareness of the process of expression, and the work is given first of all as literature. It is the nature of the terms that they are open to untold interpretations.

Quel rôle ont joué les ministères des Finances et de l’Économie dans la construction européenne ? Comment ont réagi les différentes administrations, les hauts fonctionnaires face aux nouveautés structurelles, monétaires et fiscales ? Quelles solutions a-t-on trouvé hors de l’Hexagone ? Les trente intervenants réunis lors de ce colloque apportent leurs réponses à ces questions. Leurs communications sont regroupées autour de quatre thèmes : politiques économiques et concertations dans les années soixante et soixante-dix ; administration et culture européenne ; naissance d’une politique monétaire européenne ; négociations de la PAC et du GATT. Ces Actes sont complétés par la publication du témoignage d’acteurs de la construction européenne autour de l’union monétaire, des plans Barre et Wemer et de l’harmonisation des taxes sur la valeur ajoutée dans les années soixante et soixante-dix.

After several decades under military dictatorship, Burma (Myanmar) entered a period of political transition in 2010. Following a new constitution in 2008, the military regime held elections and handed power over to a “semi-civilian” government. Former general Thein Sein was elected president in 2011 and implemented major democratic reforms. The elections of 2015 continued to confirm the political changes when the charismatic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi came to power. What is the actual nature of these seemingly dramatic changes, and what are their limits? This collection of essays brings unique perspectives to the change Burmese society underwent from 2010-2017, rather than focusing solely on the “democratization,” given so much attention in previous English-language scholarship on the political transition in Burma. Here French scholars of Burma bring their in-country experience as anthropologists, geographers and historians to reflect on the transition, offering interpretations of the continuities and discontinuities with the past, while providing new readings of the present. The essays cover the influence of local forces against external factors in bringing about change and reforms; transformations in land governance; the continuing need to include ethnic minorities in education reform; and the deep connections between Buddhist nationalism, communal violence, and the Rohingya crisis.

This is a new, accurate translation into English, with critical introduction and notes and based on recent scholarship, of Yan Zhitui’s (531–590s) complete literary works, including his famous Family Instructions, his self-annotated poetic autobiography, a never-before-translated fragmented rhapsody questioning the phenomena of the natural world, and his extant poems. The appendix provides a translation of Yan’s biographies in dynastic histories.

This open access proceedings presents new approaches to Machine Learning for Cyber Physical Systems, experiences and visions. It contains selected papers from the fifth international Conference ML4CPS – Machine Learning for Cyber Physical Systems, which was held in Berlin, March 12-13, 2020. Cyber Physical Systems are characterized by their ability to adapt and to learn: They analyze their environment and, based on observations, they learn patterns, correlations and predictive models. Typical applications are condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, image processing and diagnosis. Machine Learning is the key technology for these developments.

Rights-based ethics offer a conceptual framework to address the complex ethical issues of our time. This volume combines systematic and historical perspectives on rights-based ethics with discussions of a broad range of topics in applied ethics to assess the achievements and limits of rights-based approaches. The normative concepts of fundamental human rights and human dignity play an essential role in considerations about global justice and international politics. However, these concepts have not been taken up sufficiently in the standard approaches to normative ethics. This volume contends that rights-based approaches in ethics not only offer a theoretical framework to explain complex normative concepts, but they can also offer answers to some of today’s most complex moral questions. First, the book addresses the conceptual and foundational questions of rights-based ethics. Second, it offers historical and cultural perspectives on rights. Third, it explores how rights-based ethics can address applied issues related to climate change, health systems, global supply chains, and the finance industry. This volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and the social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International license. This publication was made possible by generous support of the Open Access-monograph funds of the university library of the TU Darmstadt and by generous support of the Institute for Philosophy I at the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Research of the Ruhr-University Bochum.

For several decades now, there have been calls to decolonize research on the Indigenous Sámi people, and to make it accountable to the Sámi society. While this has contributed to the rise of a vibrant Sámi research community in the Nordic countries, less attention has been paid to what extent, and how the "Sámi turn" in research has been implemented in practice. Written by prominent Nordic and Sámi scholars anchored in the Sámi research communities in Finland, Norway and Sweden, this volume explores not only the meanings and implications of this turn across disciplines, but also some of the challenges that efforts to create space for Sámi voices, knowledges and perspectives still meet today. The book provides a timely, interdisciplinary engagement with the central themes that have framed the development of Sámi research, and a critical appraisal of the impact that efforts to decolonize research in the Sámi context have had upon Nordic societies and state policies so far. Sámi Research in Transition is valuable for scholars and students interested in Sámi history and society, Arctic and Circumpolar Indigenous studies and critical studies on the relationship between knowledge and social change. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Autonomy is the core of a lively debate on moral and political philosophy, where many competing perspectives and conceptual distinctions are presented. Several authors tend to override the metaphysical questions of determinism and free will: this is the right step for emphasizing the dimensions of individual choice as well as the role of socialization in developing capacities for critical reflection. In this context, the most important distinction is between "moral" autonomy and "personal" autonomy. Generally speaking, the theorists of personal autonomy try to give an account of autonomy that is conceived not only as moral agency. This move allows the consideration of several patterns of practical reasoning that imply several kinds of reasons for acting. The argumentation considers the discussion between "procedural" and "substantive" theories. Procedural theories emphasize the structural conditions of the process of "identification" with one's own motives. Even if these conditions are relevant, substantive theories rightly point to the role of the content of our reasons for autonomous agency. This perspective requires substantive standards according to which we can recognize and criticize oppressive norms. The main theoretical proposal of this work is to show the normative requirements for autonomy. An intersubjective model is promising if we consider socialization from the point of view of the process through which we develop the cognitive and moral capacities necessary for autonomy. The "scorekeeping" model, (an original variant of Wittgenstein's linguistic game as proposed by Robert Brandom) seems to offer the deontic structure of discursive practices in which the agents have the possibility of discussing and criticizing their own and others' reasons.