Open Access Books

At first glance, romance seems an improbable angle from which to write a cultural history of the German Democratic Republic. By most accounts the GDR was among the most dour and disciplined of socialist states, so devoted to the rigors of Stalinist aesthetics that the notion of an East German romantic comedy was more likely to generate punch lines than lines at the box office. But in fact, as John Urang shows in Legal Tender, love was freighted as a privileged site for the negotiation and reorganization of a surprising array of issues in East German public culture between 1949 and 1989. Through close readings of a diverse selection of films and novels from the former GDR, Urang offers an eye-opening account of the ideological stakes of love stories in East German culture. Throughout its forty-year existence the East German state was plagued with an ongoing problem of legitimacy. The love story's unique and unpredictable mix of stabilizing and subversive effects gave it a peculiar status in the cultural sphere. Urang shows how love stories could mediate the problem of social stratification, providing a language with which to discuss the experience of class antagonism without undermining the Party's legitimacy. But for the Party there was danger in borrowing legitimacy from the romantic plot: the love story's destabilizing influences of desire and drive could just as easily disrupt as reconcile. A unique contribution to German studies, Legal Tender offers remarkable insights into the uses and capacities of romance in modern Western culture.At first glance, romance seems an improbable angle from which to write a cultural history of the German Democratic Republic. By most accounts the GDR was among the most dour and disciplined of socialist states, so devoted to the rigors of Stalinist aesthetics that the notion of an East German romantic comedy was more likely to generate punch lines than lines at the box office.But in fact, as John Urang shows in Legal Tender, love was freighted as a privileged site for the negotiation and reorganization of a surprising array of issues in East German public culture between 1949 and 1989. Through close readings of a diverse selection of films and novels from the former GDR, Urang offers an eye-opening account of the ideological stakes of love stories in East German culture. Throughout its forty-year existence the East German state was plagued with an ongoing problem of legitimacy. The love story's unique and unpredictable mix of stabilizing and subversive effects gave it a peculiar status in the cultural sphere.Urang shows how love stories could mediate the problem of social stratification, providing a language with which to discuss the experience of class antagonism without undermining the Party's legitimacy. But for the Party there was danger in borrowing legitimacy from the romantic plot: the love story's destabilizing influences of desire and drive could just as easily disrupt as reconcile. A unique contribution to German studies, Legal Tender offers remarkable insights into the uses and capacities of romance in modern Western culture.

The study of complex dynamic systems has become increasingly important in recent years due to its wide range of applications in fields such as engineering, physics, economics, and biology. These systems are characterized by their interconnectedness, nonlinearities, and feedback loops, which make them difficult to understand and control. As a result, there has been growing interest in developing tools and techniques for the modelling, identification, and control of complex dynamic systems.The aim of this reprint is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods for the modelling, identification, and control of complex dynamic systems. This reprint covers a wide range of topics, including system identification, model-based control, adaptive control, nonlinear control, and predictive control. It also includes case studies and examples from different fields to demonstrate the practical application of these methods.This reprint is intended for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in the field of control systems. It assumes a basic understanding of linear systems theory, calculus, and linear algebra. Overall, this reprint provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the methods for the modelling, identification, and control of complex dynamic systems.

As key decomposers within ecosystems, edible fungi embody the principles of circular agricultural production which emphasize reduction, reuse, and recycling. The realization of this sustainable approach to agriculture is inextricably linked to the cutting-edge biotechnology pertaining to edible fungi. This collection reports recent advancements and compiles reviews concerning the development of edible fungi biotechnology, offering readers an enhanced comprehension of the unique characteristics that set fungi apart from plants and animals.

In a study carried out at the Youth Development Center of the RED in Puno, Peru, during the year 2020, the aim was to investigate the relationship between family dynamics and teenage pregnancy. The research design was cross-sectional correlational, with a sample of 150 pregnant teenagers who were part of the center. To assess family dynamics, the "Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales" (FASES III) by Olson, Portner, and Laves (1986) were employed. To identify teenage pregnancy, a sexuality survey was developed, which was reviewed by experts and subjected to statistical tests with a high level of reliability (Cronbach's Alpha of 0.92). The data obtained were subjected to Chi-square correlation statistical analysis, revealing that there is no significant relationship between family dynamics and teenage pregnancy. It was observed that the majority of families exhibited a balanced family dynamic (59%), followed by medium (25%) and extreme dynamics (16%). However,the family dynamics of pregnant teenagers were characterized as even more chaotic than other situations, with an absence of clear leadership and less rigorous discipline. The results of this study indicate that there is no significant relationship betweenthe levels of family cohesion among teenagers and the occurrence of pregnancies. Most of these families exhibited a low level of cohesion, considered as separate, and chaotic family adaptability, leading to conflicts within the family environment, and consequently, some teenagers sought pregnancy as a way to escape their problems, resorting to the streets. In conclusion, family dynamics do not seem to be a determining factor in teenage pregnancies in this population.

This is the second of two volumes on the mechanisms of oral communication in ancient Greece, focused on epic poetry, which had deep roots in orality. Combining the tools of cognitive science with the historical and literary analysis of the texts, this survey considers the traces of orality in archaic epic poetry and their adaptation in the changes that the comminicative system showed both synchronously and diachronically.

privacy; data protection; data mining; predictive analytics

The future battlespace promises to be complex, unpredictable, and multifaceted. To answer its challenges, military professionals must think deeply and innovatively about warfare’s evolving character and how to gain decisive advantage across a hotly contested global landscape. Evolution on Demand: The Changing Roles of the U.S. Marine Corps in Twenty-first Century Conflicts and Beyond, featuring the work of nonresident fellows of the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, offers critical insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Drawing on a range of perspectives and areas of expertise, they explore the strategic, operational, and technological factors that will shape military conflict in the years to come. Each chapter not only provides an in-depth analysis of specific challenges but also offers practical recommendations for how the Marine Corps and its allies can prepare to win the future fight. The contributions in this volume underscore the need for militaries, particularly the U.S. Marine Corps, to adapt to these changes and remain at the cutting edge of innovation and strategy.

Title in English: Outdoor Education and its Inclusion into Teaching at PdF MU: Support for the Use of Technology and the Implementation of Research Activities in the Undergraduate Education of Future Teachers The teaching material “Outdoor Education and its Inclusion into Teaching at PdF MU. Support for the Use of Technology and the Implementation of Research Activities in the Undergraduate Education of Future Teachers“ is the outcome of the project OP VVV Development of the process of undergraduate education at PdF MU: thorough preparation for good practice. One of the outcomes of the project was the preparation of innovative educational materials and courses. The courses were to reflect the educational areas within the updated Framework Educational Programme. In their content, there was to be a maximum connection of teaching with the use of cross-curricular topics. In the course of these, modern strategies for managing learning activities were to be adequately included.

Developing variable systems faces many challenges. Dependencies between interrelated artifacts within a product variant, such as code or diagrams, across product variants and across their revisions quickly lead to inconsistencies during evolution. This work provides a unification of common concepts and operations for variability management, identifies variability-related inconsistencies and presents an approach for view-based consistency preservation of variable systems.

Propiciadas por el desarrollo de la imprenta, las continuaciones literarias conocen en la España de la Edad Clásica un verdadero auge que afecta a todos los ámbitos de la ficción. Sin embargo, este fenómeno no es totalmente nuevo puesto que durante la Edad Media cualquier elaboración literaria se centraba en la reutilización y continuación de textos ajenos. Sin hacer caso omiso de esta herencia medieval, este libro trata de especificar la noción de continuación para la época moderna considerándola como una modalidad peculiar del préstamo. Situándose por encima de las fronteras genéricas, ofrece un estudio de conjunto de esta práctica proponiendo una arqueología de la misma y tomando en cuenta la dimensión creativa que conllevan las obras correspondientes.

The book presents two types of work: on the one hand, a series of tributes to distinguished and recently deceased legal historians; on the other hand, a set of papers presented by members of the Spanish Society for the History of Law, dealing with different issues of relevance for legal historiography with a single theme but at the same time of enormous diversity and interest, since under the umbrella of the idea of the centre-periphery duality, the most varied aspects of the Spanish historical-legal past are examined in depth from the perspective of rights in territories and societies, not forgetting specifically university research in this respect. This is the result of the research that was presented during the congress of the III Conference of the Spanish Society for the History of Law held at the University of La Laguna in June 2023, in which the authors offered solid, as well as very new, contributions of enormous interest for the knowledge of the historical-legal past and the transcendence of this past for a correct understanding of the importance of the legal in today's society.

This article uses data on participation in the priorate in the fourteenth century to analyze the change over time in the intensity and nature of the processes of social mobility in Florence. It is a small experiment that attempts to circumvent the problem posed by the difficulty of measuring social mobility in historical contexts for which we do not have the statistical data that sociologists use to study this phenomenon in contemporary societies. Indeed, in the absence of any attempt at measurement, the concept of mobility runs the risk of remaining too vague and ineffective as an interpretive tool for understanding social dynamics and their change. The final section briefly addresses the even more complex issue of the relationship between social mobility and economic inequality.

This book reports on cutting-edge research within the new field of active rheology control of cementitious materials, presenting new ideas developed within the ERC Advanced Grant Project, SmartCast (hosted at Ghent University), which extend the possibilities of admixtures and additions beyond current options. The research presented here develops a new method of actively controlling the rheology of fresh concrete during casting operations by incorporating specially designed responsive components. This results in real-time changes to the rheological behaviour of the cementitious material, allowing the user to intervene actively after the cementitious material has left the mixing phase. This newly gained agility contributes to increased processing speed and placement reliability in the case of traditional casting methods and can also facilitate advanced 3D concrete printing. The different routes followed to achieve this Active Rheology Control are explained within. The book suits researchers and innovative practitioners and is the first comprehensive text to present these new findings. 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 4.0 license.

Notwithstanding its many successes since 1945, the project of European integration currently faces major difficulties, from financial crises and mass immigration to the impending departure of the UK from the European Union. At the same time, these challenges have spurred civil society organizations within and across Europe, revealing a shared public sphere in which citizens can mobilize around refugee rights, opposition to austerity policies, and other issues. emEuropeanization in Sweden/em assembles new empirical research on how these processes have played out in one of the continent's wealthiest nations, providing insights into whether, and how, the "Swedish model" can guide European integration./p