Open Access Books

Wie geht die Universität als privilegierter Ort der Wissenschaft mit den Erschütterungen der Covid-19-Pandemie um? Die Beiträger*innen beleuchten die deutsch-französische Forschungslandschaft sowie die Institution Universität während der Covid-19-Pandemie aus interdisziplinärer Sicht und zeigen: Mehr als sonst gerät die Universität ins zentrale Blickfeld gesellschaftlicher Aushandlungen. Das Jahrbuch dokumentiert außerdem das Treffen der Frankreich- und Frankophoniezentren Deutschlands zur 25-Jahr-Feier des Frankreichzentrums der Universität des Saarlandes sowie die französische Gastdozentur 2021 »Theaterarbeit transnational«. Rezensionen zu aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Werken aus dem deutsch-französischen Bereich komplettieren den Band.

Inwiefern ist ein positives Körpererleben auch für queere Menschen an normative Konzepte von Geschlechtlichkeit, Körperlichkeit und Subjektivität gebunden? Corinna Schmechels emotionstheoretischer Ansatz zeigt fundiert die immanenten Ambivalenzen eines normkritischen »Empowerment durch Sport« im Kontext der Fitnesskultur als spätmoderner Subjekt- und Körperkultur auf.

Alexander Williamson was professor of chemistry at UCL (1849–87) and a leading scientist of his time. He taught and cared for visiting Japanese students, thereby assisting them with their goal of modernising Japan. This short, accessible biography explores his contribution to nineteenth-century science as well as his lasting impact on Japanese society. In 1863 five students from the Chōshū clan, with a desperate desire to learn from the West, made their way to England. They were put in the care of Williamson and his wife. Their mission was to learn about cutting-edge Western technology, science, economics and politics. When they returned home they rapidly became leading figures in Japanese life at a particularly turbulent time, one of them serving as the country’s first prime minister. Subsequently many other Japanese students followed in their footsteps and studied at UCL. The remarkable story of the part Williamson and UCL played in the modernisation of Japan is little known today. This biography will promote a deeper understanding of Williamson’s scientific innovations and his legacy for Anglo-Japanese relations. An afterword briefly outlines the extraordinary careers of the pioneering students after they left Britain.

This open access book describes the nondestructive assay techniques that are used for the measurement of nuclear material (primarily uranium and plutonium) for nuclear material accountancy purposes. It is a substantial revision to the so-called PANDA manual that has been a standard reference since its publication in 1991. The book covers the origin and interactions of gamma rays and neutrons as they affect nuclear measurements and also describes the theory and practice of calorimetry. The book gives a description of many instruments based on these techniques that are applied in the field. Although the basic physics has not changed since PANDA was first published, the last thirty years have seen many advances in analysis methods, instrumentation, and applications. The basic descriptions of the origin and interactions of radiation have been updated and include newer references. There have been extensive revisions of the description of gamma detection methods, attenuation correction procedures, and analysis methods, including for the measurement of uranium enrichment and the determination of plutonium isotopic composition. Extensive revisions and additions have also been made to the description of neutron detectors and to the explanation of neutron coincidence techniques. The chapter on neutron multiplicity techniques is a new addition to this edition. The applications of gamma and neutron techniques have been completely overhauled to remove obsolete systems and to include many current applications. The values of, and references to, nuclear data have been updated. This updated edition is an essential reference for academic researchers and practitioners in the field. This is an open access book.

This book offers an interdisciplinary insight into the key debates around information warfare in the digital age and argues that transnational cooperation can mitigate the threat. States and societies are increasingly vulnerable to cyber-enabled information operations. From efforts to divide nations, undermine public policy, manipulate elections, and generate social discord, malign actors use the online realm to wreak havoc on our offline lives. The book explores the digital disinformation dilemma that confronts liberal democracies, reflecting on shared socio-political challenges and solutions to contemporary information operations amongst the Five Eyes states and beyond. The work aims to generate a holistic human-centric perspective on the challenges of digital (dis)information operations through interdisciplinary insight into shared challenges and solutions to contemporary information warfare. Together, these perspectives enable us to more effectively identify opportunities to address the challenge and increase the potential to enrich international collaborative efforts to safeguard liberal democracies from threats to their information environments. This book will be of much interest to students of information warfare, intelligence studies, foreign policy and International Relations.

Focusing on the difference between lower-level perceptual processes in the “neural unconscious” and higher-order thought in the frontal lobes, this open access book shows how Herman Melville sought to reclaim the fluid world of the sensory, with its precategorical and radically egalitarian impulses. By studying this previously underexamined facet of Melville’s work, this book offers an essential corrective to the “pathology paradigm,” which demonizes departures from a neurological norm and feasts on pejorative categorization. The neurodiversity movement arose precisely as a response to how so-called “mental disorders” have been described, understood, and treated. Unlike standard neuroscientific or psychiatric investigation, Melville’s work doesn’t strive to explain typical functioning through the negative and, in the process, to shore up a regime of normalcy. To the contrary, it exploits the lack of congealed diagnoses in the 19th Century, much more neutrally asking the question: what can an atypical body-mind do? Steeped in current studies about autism, Alzheimer’s, Capgras and Fregoli syndromes, Mirror-touch synesthesia, phantom limb syndrome, stuttering, and tinnitus, and fully conversant with Melville scholarship, Phenomenological Primitives demonstrates what the humanities can contribute to the sciences and what the sciences can contribute to the humanities. 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 in part by Grinnell College.

In the beginning there was anarchy—but was there? The nineteenth century is (mis)understood as a century in which states were free to wage war against each other whenever they deemed it politically necessary. Not until the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the UN Charter was this ‘free right to go to war’ (liberum ius ad bellum) gradually outlawed. The dark times of anarchy were over. Lighter times dawned—and, with them, ‘radical transformations’ of international law and politics. This story of progress is widely shared. But it is puzzling. For a ‘free right to go to war’ has never been empirically proven. By outlining a genealogy of modern war justifications and drawing on multiple political and normative discourses, A Century of Anarchy? argues that this ‘right’ actually never existed (Part I). Rather, it was an invention by realist legal scholars in Imperial Germany who argued against the mainstream of European liberalism (Part II). Paradoxically, this now forgotten Sonderweg reading was universalized in international historiographies after the World Wars. But the characterization of nineteenth-century international relations as anarchic is as inaccurate as it is widespread: in addition to deconstructing the myth of liberum ius ad bellum, this book traces the political and theoretical roots of the modern prohibition of war in the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1789–1918). The latter is not to be understood as the anarchic photo-negative of the modern international order governing the use of force. It was the era of its birth.

In dieser Untersuchung werden mit der Logistik und dem wirtschaftlichen Wettbewerb zwei Themenfelder miteinander verknüpft, welche innerhalb der ökonomischen Theorie bislang isoliert voneinander betrachtet wurden und noch immer werden. Hauptzielsetzung der Arbeit ist es zu zeigen, dass Logistik und wirtschaftlicher Wettbewerb, welche prima facie verschiedene Ausschnitte der Ökonomik beleuchten und voneinander unabhängig zu sein scheinen, bei näherer Betrachtung dennoch konzeptionelle Parallelen und vielfältige Wirkungsinterdependenzen aufweisen. Diese werden aufgedeckt, systematisiert und bezüglich ihrer Ausgestaltungsform sowie ihrer Wirkungsrichtung konkretisiert.

This Handbook provides an authoritative and foundational disciplinary overview of African Public Policy and a comprehensive examination of the practicalities of policy analysis, policymaking processes, implementation, and administration in Africa today. The book assembles a multidisciplinary team of distinguished and upcoming Africanist scholars, practitioners, researchers and policy experts working inside and outside Africa to analyse the historical and emerging policy issues in 21st-century Africa. While mostly attentive to comparative public policy in Africa, this book attempts to address some of the following pertinent questions: How can public policy be understood and taught in Africa? How does policymaking occur in unstable political contexts, or in states under pressure? Has the democratisation of governing systems improved policy processes in Africa? How have recent transformations, such as technological proliferation in Africa, impacted public policy processes? What are the underlying challenges and potential policy paths for Africa going forward? The contributions examine an interplay of prevailing institutional, political, structural challenges and opportunities for policy effectiveness to discern striking commonalities and trajectories across different African states. This is a valuable resource for practitioners, politicians, researchers, university students, and academics interested in studying and understanding how African countries are governed.

Presenting contributions from renowned experts in the field, this book covers research and development in fundamental areas of heat exchangers, which include: design and theoretical development, experiments, numerical modeling and simulations. This book is intended to be a useful reference source and guide to researchers, postgraduate students, and engineers in the fields of heat exchangers, cooling, and thermal management.

Berte Kanutte Aarflot lived in the Northwestern region of Norway in the 19th century. In this book, her great-great-grandson gives the first overview of her written work and puts it in the context of her time. Aarflot, a woman who left a big mark both in the religious sphere and in society, published over 600 pages of religious litterature. This is the 34th book in the series Kyrkjefag Profil.

This study analyses trends in UHF spectrum use and demands by users of UHF spectrum. Thanks to availability of a large database that contains spectrum scans of a multitude of events over a large timespan, trends in availability of PMSE spectrum and PMSE use can be derived. Thereby conclusions are based on real world data from the field. A statistical modelling of available and used spectrum with PMSE is conducted. This allows for probabilistic conclusions when in future it will no longer be possible to use PMSE to an extend as initially planned. A shortage of PMSE frequencies at UHF is up on the horizon. When this scarcity becomes immanent is scientifically derived on the basis of stochastic considerations. As with earlier studies the role of technological advancements with PMSE, cellular and broadcast are discussed with respect to efficiency of spectrum use. Aside of technological trends there are also trends in society, like an increased awareness about inclusion, barrier-free access to events and remote participation, which are further drivers to larger PMSE use. Finally, this study will derive conclusions and derive recommendation towards Politicians, Regulation, Standardization, Mobile Network Operators and lastly PMSE and cellular equipment suppliers.

This open access volume identifies the common and specific aspects of social mechanisms that generate inequalities, through comparative analyses of different dimensions in which inequalities are expressed. It includes studies on social inequalities in 5 European and 5 Latin American countries, along 11 thematic axes: inequalities in the labour market and labour trajectories; asymmetries in the relationship between training and employment; inequalities in work and family life; educational inequalities; geographical and social inequalities: ethnicity and language; social inequalities, migration and space; uncertainty, strategies, resources and capabilities; inequality of opportunity: intergenerational social mobility; social policies; gender inequalities; and research methodology. This volume is the result of a large collaborative project on social inequality funded by the European Commission: the International Network for Comparative Analysis of Social Inequalities. Taking into account diverse perspectives and approximations, the collaborators have created a general analytical framework as a model of analysis of social inequalities. The various contributions in this volume help readers gain a global outlook and help reflect on social inequalities in a comparative perspective. This volume addresses social science graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, social policy makers, as well as a broader academic audience interested in social inequality.

This Special Issue reprint delves into the dynamic world of robotic systems, offering a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in modeling, optimization, and control. Robotics has emerged as a transformative field with applications spanning from industrial automation to healthcare and beyond. In this collection, leading researchers and practitioners present their cutting-edge work, shedding light on the intricate processes involved in designing, optimizing, and controlling robotic systems. From intricate mathematical models that capture the complex dynamics of robotic manipulators to innovative optimization techniques that enhance efficiency and performance, each contribution in this reprint offers valuable insights into the state-of-the-art methodologies shaping the future of robotics. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is highlighted, with discussions spanning areas such as mechanical design, electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Readers will find a diverse array of topics covered, including trajectory planning for autonomous vehicles, learning-based control strategies for humanoid robots, adaptive control algorithms for flexible manipulators, and many more. Through a blend of theoretical analysis, practical applications, and experimental validation, this reprint provides a comprehensive overview of the latest trends and challenges in the field of robotic systems.