Open Access Books

The essays published in this volume, taken from a 2017 conference at the German Mining Museum in Bochum, examine mining heritage with regard to museumization, digitalization, restoration, and object research. At the same time, the volume reflects the diversity of mining’s historical legacy, which extends from associations to large museums of technology.

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) plays a key role in the formulation of economic, reliable, and secure operating strategies (planning, scheduling, maintenance, and control processes, among others) for a power system and will be significant in the future. However, there is still much to do in these research areas. The deployment of enabling technologies (e.g., smart meters) has made high-granularity data available for many customer segments and to approach many issues, for instance, to make forecasting tasks feasible at several demand aggregation levels. The first challenge is the improvement of STLF models and their performance at new aggregation levels. Moreover, the mix of renewables in the power system, and the necessity to include more flexibility through demand response initiatives have introduced greater uncertainties, which means new challenges for STLF in a more dynamic power system in the 2030–50 horizon. Many techniques have been proposed and applied for STLF, including traditional statistical models and AI techniques. Besides, distribution planning needs, as well as grid modernization, have initiated the development of hierarchical load forecasting. Analogously, the need to face new sources of uncertainty in the power system is giving more importance to probabilistic load forecasting. This Special Issue deals with both fundamental research and practical application research on STLF methodologies to face the challenges of a more distributed and customer-centered power system.

The Second International Conference on Maintenance and Rehabilitation of Constructed Infrastructure Facilities (MAIREINFRA2: Chairman Hosin “David” Lee, Professor of University of Iowa, Associate Editor MDPI Infrastructures Journal, and Immediate Past President of iSMARTi) is organized by the International Society for Maintenance and Rehabilitation of Transport Infrastructures (iSMARTi). The sustainable and resilient maintenance and rehabilitation of infrastructure is becoming a key challenge. The objective of this conference is to exchange technological innovations among researchers, government employees, consultants, and contractors for maintaining and rehabilitating sustainable and resilient infrastructures, which include roads, rails, bridges, and buildings. MAIREINFRA2 is for sustainable infrastructure engineers, smart city designers, disaster resilience professionals, intelligent transportation engineers, construction managers, maintenance engineers, consulting engineers, government employees, and academic researchers involved in designing and managing sustainable infrastructures worldwide. All papers accepted for the conference are published in the Open Access Scopus-Indexed MDPI Engineering Proceedings journal.

This book reflects on the implications of neurobiology and the scientific worldview on aspects of religious experience, belief, and practice, focusing especially on the body and the construction of religious meaning. Readership: All those interested in neurobiology and religion, contemporary culture and religion, theology and embodiment, anthropology, sociology, and psychology of religion, including scholars, students, educated laymen, academic and public libraries.

The sixteenth volume of the publication series of the "Haus der kleinen Forscher" Foundation, with a foreword by Andreas Hartinger, presents three contributions that were written as part of the PRIMA!2023 project to provide a professional foundation for the Foundation's work in the primary sector. The content focuses on the one hand on the quality of STEM lessons and on the other hand on the question of how teachers should be trained in order to be able to plan and implement good STEM lessons.

Following a relational, Indigenous-led approach grounded in 25 years of collaborative work, this book looks to weather and climate, tracing the embodied, emplaced and affective ways weather co-constitutes people, place and time/s raising critical questions of ethics, politics and becoming. Becoming weather leads the reader through a reflexive engagement with weather, seeking to shed light on pressing issues around climate change and its entanglements: from the body where contours of weather are intimately felt and known, to the ways that agencies of weather are implicated in the construction of nations, to global topologies of climate (in)justice. Reflecting on deep and ongoing collaborative work undertaken with Indigenous-led research collectives in Australia and the Philippines, the book traces contours of response-ability, learning from weathery relationships to speak back to constructions of climate that see it as aer nullius, belonging to no-one, and that deny ongoing responsibilities, becomings and belongings. The book aims to support more-than-human and relational understandings of weather that situate us all within an ethics of differential cobecoming and that demand attention to the connections that bind and co-constitute. The book is intended for those interested in thinking differently about weather and climate, particularly those who feel an urgent dissatisfaction with mainstream responses and understandings. It will be beneficial for those who would learn from weather, from and with place, in ways led by Indigenous scholars and their allies though an engaged, reflexive, more-than-human and ethnographic account. It does not shy away from critical engagement, nor the changes desperately needed to learn and unlearn, to attend to positionalities and responsibilities, and to engage with what it means to weather on unceded Indigenous land.

Frauen* und Technik: Die Studie beleuchtet Ursachen für den geringen Anteil von Frauen* in der Technik-Branche und ermittelt anhand einer qualitativen Untersuchung branchenspezifische Erwartungen und Stereotype. Das Buch zeichnet dabei auch die Entstehungsgeschichte der Tech-Branche nach und stellt die aktuelle Genderverteilung innerhalb der Tech-Branche, insbesondere in Deutschland, vor.; Women* and technology: The study sheds light on the reasons for the low proportion of women* in the technology sector and uses a qualitative investigation to identify sector-specific expectations and stereotypes. The book also traces the history of the development of the tech industry and presents the current gender distribution within the tech industry, particularly in Germany.

In what ways does the biographical experience of violence of social workers affect their professional attitude and counselling work in women's shelters? This question forms the basis for an examination of the resources and risks of personal involvement in relation to professional counselling attitudes and counselling relationships. Additionally, the conditions that allow personal involvement to be understood as a resource rather than an obstacle are determined. By examining the connection between biography and professionalisation in social work, the author makes an important contribution to the debate on professionalisation.

Objective Information Theory (OIT) is proposed to represent and compute the information in a large-scale complex information system with big data in this monograph. To formally analyze, design, develop, and evaluate the information, OIT interprets the information from essential nature, measures the information from mathematical properties, and models the information from concept, logic, and physic. As the exemplified applications, Air Traffic Control System (ATCS) and Smart Court SoSs (System of Systems) are introduced for practical OITs. This Open Access book can be used as a technical reference book in the field of information science and also a reference textbook for senior students and graduate ones in related majors.

This books investigates the background and nature of the Ottoman Jihad proclamation, but also its effects in the wider Middle East. It looks at the German hopes and British fears of a worldwide rising of Muslims in the colonial empires. It also discusses the fierce academic debates caused by the Jihad proclamation, in which the 1915 manifesto of Leiden Islam scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (“Holy War Made in Germany”) played a key role. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.

When Courant prepared the text of his 1942 address to the American Mathematical Society for publication, he added a two-page Appendix to illustrate how the variational methods first described by Lord Rayleigh could be put to wider use in potential theory. Choosing piecewise-linear approximants on a set of triangles which he called elements, he dashed off a couple of two-dimensional examples and the finite element method was born. … Finite element activity in electrical engineering began in earnest about 1968-1969. A paper on waveguide analysis was published in Alta Frequenza in early 1969, giving the details of a finite element formulation of the classical hollow waveguide problem. It was followed by a rapid succession of papers on magnetic fields in saturable materials, dielectric loaded waveguides, and other well-known boundary value problems of electromagnetics. … In the decade of the eighties, finite element methods spread quickly. In several technical areas, they assumed a dominant role in field problems. P.P. Silvester, San Miniato (PI), Italy, 1992 Early in the nineties the International Workshop on Finite Elements for Microwave Engineering started. This volume contains the history of the Workshop and the Proceedings of the 13th edition, Florence (Italy), 2016 . The 14th Workshop will be in Cartagena (Colombia), 2018.

This book focuses on catalytic hydrogen generation from formic acid, ammonia borane, and ethanol as well as on the production of fuels from tar using formic acid as a hydrogen source. The list of discussed catalysts includes single-atom catalysts, metallic/bimetallic catalysts, and supported metal complexes. These catalysts were thoroughly characterized using different methods. Optimized catalyst compositions are proposed.

Plutarch distinguishes Alexander king of Macedonia as a genius in military art and diplomacy to consolidate his power. During his life, just a little more than 30 years, the young king changed the political and cultural map of his time: he put a large European, African, and Asiatic space under his authority, promoted an intercultural globalisation to unify a multiplicity of peoples as a huge empire, and transferred the intellectual centre of the world from Athens to other oriental cities. But an unmeasured ambition harmed all his project and even its author’s life. By pairing Caesar with Alexander, Plutarch brings out the fame of a great conqueror, the aspect of personality that the biographer most admires in this Roman statesman. But the ambition (philotimia) that repeatedly moves Caesar represents the black side that will lead him to the death, before he can reap the fruits of his eagerness. Although not completely transforming Caesar into a cruel tyrant (which he was not), this Life illustrates, however, a criticism of the exacerbated and irrational ambition of power.

This volume examines the question of whether the central educational goals of promoting cognitive development on the one hand and socio-emotional development on the other are in conflict, or whether they can support each other under certain conditions. For a long time, research and teaching have focused strongly on cognitive development, with the aim of equipping all learners with basic academic competencies. However, the (intentional) fostering of socio-emotional aspects is becoming increasingly important.This book discusses the compatibility of these two educational goals from various disciplinary perspectives. The contributors are internationally selected experts from Germany, Switzerland, and the United States.