Open Access Books

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This open access book focuses on the geopolitical competition in the South China Sea, an area with highly concentrated choke points in the Indo-Pacific, presenting ideas and recommendations to manage this competition and foster cooperation to maintain a peaceful and stable environment and promote sustainable governance of the South China Sea and of the Indo-Pacific in a broader sense. The increasingly complex geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific has made the South China Sea the epicenter of strategic competition between the great powers, with a rising China on the one hand and the United States, its allies, and partners on the other. In this strategic chessboard, the South China Sea is a test of resilience of the rules-based international order, such as versus grey zone operations, as well as disruptive technological developments in both traditional and non-traditional domains. The book incorporates foreign policy analysis methods to analyze and forecast key players' goals, intentions, and behaviors within the competitive strategic environment of the South China Sea. The success or failure of managing major power competition in the South China Sea, one of the hot spots of the Indo-Pacific region, will determine the future structure of international relations. In addition, as a dynamically developing region of the world, promoting collaborative ideas, particularly in areas related to conflict management is essential for maintaining a peaceful and stable environment, restoring economic growth, and progressing toward a sustainable future. This book is of interest to politicians, policy-makers, experts, scholars, researchers, and other readers who are interested in how regional issues can shape the global order.

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Wie viele Kunstgeschichten gibt es? Eine vielstimmige Antwort auf diese Frage bieten die im vorliegenden Band, der Festschrift für Stephan Albrecht anlässlich seines 60. Geburtstags, versammelten Beiträge. Siebenundzwanzig Autorinnen und Autoren geben Einblick in ihre aktuelle Forschung. Gegenstände und Methoden sind vielfältig: die Materialität des Artefakts, das Portal als liminaler Ort oder die Kontextwechsel und kulturellen Neuzuschreibungen mittelalterlicher Objekte in nachmittelalterlichen Gesellschaften. Die Beiträge verstehen sich als Einladungen zum interdisziplinären Gespräch. Und sie antworten auf die Forschungen Stephan Albrechts, indem sie – 60 Jahre nach dem traité d’amitié franco-allemand – deutsch-französische Perspektiven einnehmen, sich mit der Kunst der Kathedralen auseinandersetzen, mit der gebauten Stadt und mit Geschichte als Konstrukt.

Stochastic control plays an important role in many scientific and applied disciplines including communications, engineering, medicine, finance and many others. It is one of the effective methods being used to find optimal decision-making strategies in applications. The book provides a collection of outstanding investigations in various aspects of stochastic systems and their behavior. The book provides a self-contained treatment on practical aspects of stochastic modeling and calculus including applications drawn from engineering, statistics, and computer science. Readers should be familiar with basic probability theory and have a working knowledge of stochastic calculus. PhD students and researchers in stochastic control will find this book useful.

This volume examines the perception of the French principle of laïcité or secularism and attempts to demonstrate to English-speaking readers that the configurations of the French model of laïcité are both more flexible and complex than they appear to be. Due to the diversification of France's religious landscape (notably with a Muslim minority estimated at 7% of the population) and some of the effects of Europeanisation, French secularism is being urged to shed its anti-religious tendencies and abandon a version of secularism conceived as an alternative to religion. The French Republic is not a secularist state but a secular state where secularism is conceived as a founding principle of pluralistic democracies.

Negli studi storico-teatrali il nome di Otto Brahm, una delle personalità più incisive e lungimiranti dello scenario teatrale tedesco di fine Ottocento, è comunemente accostato all’esperienza condotta nella progressista Freie Bühne di Berlino in veste di direttore. Meno nota è l’attività di critico, rintracciabile negli scritti pubblicati su una serie di riviste e quotidiani germanofoni, nel periodo che intercorre tra il 1881 e il 1892. Tale stagione giornalistica si è rivelata essere una fonte inestimabile sia per la ricostruzione dell’avvento della corrente naturalista in Germania, che per la comprensione dell’icastico ruolo assunto dalla critica teatrale in questa epoca. Proponendo un’analisi delle recensioni di Brahm, il volume intende evidenziare l’incidenza esercitata dalle opere drammatiche di Henrik Ibsen e Gerhart Hauptmann, nel processo di rinnovamento dell’ambiente culturale germanico, ancora fermo agli schematismi delle pièces bien faites francesi. In questa direzione, una varietà di documenti d’archivio, composta da saggi, corrispondenze e recensioni, si offrono come strumenti concreti per inquadrare la figura di Otto Brahm come artefice di un «forum del teatro moderno».

Quand il s agit de création humaine et non divine, artistique et non théologique, dire que la création a ses contraintes sonne presque comme une évidence. Tout artiste, qu’il soit écrivain, poète, mais aussi plasticien, musicien, homme ou femme de théâtre, de cinéma, etc. et à quelque siècle qu’il appartienne, connaît ce qu’on appelle trivialement, en amont, les affres de la création et, en aval, l’angoisse de la réception. Le cahier des charges de la création apparaît sans fin. Cependant, comment penser, ainsi que le suggère le titre de ce volume, non seulement la création contrainte, mais surtout la contrainte créatrice ? Venue du dehors ou du dedans, formelle ou thématique, imposée ou librement adoptée, comment la contrainte stimule-t-elle la force créatrice ? Comment l’oriente- t-elle ? Pour répondre à ces questions, les auteurs de cet ouvrage ont souhaité proposer un parcours riche et diversifié, transséculaire, au gré des perspectives et des disciplines. S’appuyant sur l’analyse d’œuvres littéraires et artistiques concrètes, ils ont cherché à saisir dans la facture même de l’œuvre les secrets du rapport mystérieux entre création et contrainte.

Atherosclerosis is a subject of enormous contention for cardiologists and in general for all medical doctors. With this publication we have given you a concise "state-of-the-art" look at the world of atheroma. Many other elements could be included and so it is only a brief analysis of "today" (the preventive medicine era) and "tomorrow" (transforming the cure medicine era into the care medicine era) but also remembering "yesterday" (the ex-cathedra medicine era). Let's hope our arteries are free from atherosclerotic events: have a good read!

The IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 21st century. ICCS 2016 is the second cycle of a study initiated in 2009. This report from ICCS focuses on data collected in the 15 countries that participated in the study’s 2016 European regional questionnaire. It reveals lower secondary school students’ views on European identity, their perceptions of freedom of movement and immigration, and their opinions of Europe and its future. It also, for the 12 European countries that participated in both ICCS 2009 and ICCS 2016, looks at changes across this time period, in young people’s perceptions of immigration and European identity. Comparison with the complete international study will enable readers to review the extent to which region-specific perceptions are related to other factors, such as students’ level of civic knowledge and social or educational contexts. Over the past 50 years, the IEA has conducted comparative research studies in a range of domains focusing on educational policies, practices, and outcomes in many countries around the world. The association conducted its first survey of civic education in 1971. The reliable comparative data collected by ICCS 2016 will allow education systems to evaluate the strengths of educational policies, both internationally and within a regional context, and to measure their progress toward achieving critical components of the United Nations’ 2030 agenda for sustainable development.

Between the 14th and 15th centuries, a dense network of trade relations was active in the maritime basin of the western Mediterranean. The three regional areas that overlooked this sea, the Iberian and Provencal, the Italian and the African, and all the islands that were present in it, were equipped with numerous and important landing points and were connected by a dense network of exchanges. The essay takes into consideration the characteristics of this network of economic and cultural connections, and analyzes, particularly through the use of the Datini Archive, the role of the port of Rome in this system of exchanges and the links that merchants and bankers who acted in this city entertained with the Iberian mercantile centers.

The third edition of GIS has been revised with extensive new content reflecting the significant progress that has been made in the realm of GIS within the last 20 years. Among the new topics covered are graph databases and graph query languages, ontology engineering and qualitative spatial reasoning, geosensor networks and GeoAI.

This book proposes an approach to literary education grounded in the social value of reading, writing, and sharing. It aims to restore centrality to the concrete experience of literary texts in the classroom, engaging each student as an active participant in their learning journey. The first chapters engage with narratology, cognitive psychology, literature pedagogy, and Gianni Rodari’s thought, reflecting on real readers, texts, and media. The second part addresses the institutional context of teaching, with references to school regulations, the digital transition, and the competence-based education framework.

This volume allowed us to gather Brazilian, Spanish, French, Greeks, Italians. and Portuguese specialists who search about magic and superstition in the Ancient Mediterranean. The theme circled around the relationship between Magic, religion and superstition in different ancient societies and with a sharp updated bibliography which leads us to reflect on the relationship between men and the gods and their different magical religious manifestations.