Open Access Books

How is digitalization of the offshore oil industry fundamentally changing how we understand work and ways of knowing? Digitalization sits at the forefront of public and academic conversation today, calling into question how we work and how we know. In Digital Oil, Eric Monteiro uses the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry as a lens to investigate the effects of digitalization on embodied labor and, in doing so, shows how our use of new digital technology transforms work and knowing. For years, roughnecks have performed the dangerous and unwieldy work of extracting the oil that lies three miles below the seabed along the Norwegian continental shelf. Today, the Norwegian oil industry is largely digital, operated by sensors and driven by data. Digital representations of physical processes inform work practices and decision-making with remotely operated, unmanned deep-sea facilities. Drawing on two decades of in-depth interviews, observations, news clips, and studies of this industry, Monteiro dismantles the divide between the virtual and the physical in Digital Oil. What is gained or lost when objects and processes become algorithmic phenomena with the digital inferred from the physical? How can data-driven work practices and operational decision-making approximate qualitative interpretation, professional judgement, and evaluation? How are emergent digital platforms and infrastructures, as machineries of knowing, enabling digitalization? In answering these questions Monteiro offers a novel analysis of digitalization as an effort to press the limits of quantification of the qualitative.

This Special Issue includes original research and reviews of the literature focusing on food labels, which are a tool to promote public health that, at the same time, may represent a marketing tool and may influence consumers’ perception of food quality.

Au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, dix millions de soldats alliés ont été faits prisonniers par le Reich nazi tandis qu’onze millions de soldats allemands étaient capturés par les Alliés. Malgré l’ampleur de ce phénomène et les nombreux sévices subis par ces prisonniers de guerre (faim, humiliations, déshumanisation, exil…), leur histoire a été longtemps éclipsée par celle des camps de concentration et d’extermination. Cet ouvrage s’inscrit dans une lignée d’efforts faits pour connaître et faire connaître la captivité des prisonniers de guerre, avec ce double objectif d’en perpétuer la mémoire et d’éclairer des aspects particuliers peu étudiés. À travers une démarche comparatiste en Allemagne, en Autriche, en Pologne et en France, il s’efforce de comprendre la dimension européenne des souffrances causées par la captivité de guerre du fait de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans un contexte de « devoir de mémoire », il vise aussi à s’interroger sur la transmission de cette mémoire de la captivité par les témoignages oraux, les œuvres d’art et les initiatives muséographiques. Les études mettent en avant l’intérêt majeur des œuvres créées en captivité par des artistes amateurs ou confirmés. Ces œuvres perpétuent « la mémoire en respectant la vérité » ; elles sont une source essentielle pour la recherche historique, en tant que témoignage de la vie des prisonniers de guerre et comme vecteur de la mémoire de leur génération.

This collection of essays brings together a range of critical approaches, from varying disciplinary backgrounds, to provide an in-depth overview of the past and current status of small-scale fisheries in Japan. The book attempts to map out some of the major themes relating to community-based fisheries-management systems, environmental sustainability, lottery systems for allocating fishing spots, fishing livelihoods, local knowledge, social vulnerability to environmental hazards, socioeconomic factors affecting small-scale fisheries development, history of destructive fishing practices, women’s entrepreneurship in the seafood sector, traditional leadership systems, religious festivals, and power relationship between local communities and government agencies. The aim of this book is then to provide a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of the cultural richness of this fishing sector, which still plays a key role in the broad academic debates focused on the potential small-scale fishery trajectories within the context of global scenarios.

During the past four decades or so, various operators of fractional calculus, such as those named after Riemann–Liouville, Weyl, Hadamard, Grunwald–Letnikov, Riesz, Erdelyi–Kober, Liouville–Caputo, and so on, have been found to be remarkably popular and important due mainly to their demonstrated applications in numerous diverse and widespread fields of the mathematical, physical, chemical, engineering, and statistical sciences. Many of these fractional calculus operators provide several potentially useful tools for solving differential, integral, differintegral, and integro-differential equations, together with the fractional-calculus analogues and extensions of each of these equations, and various other problems involving special functions of mathematical physics, as well as their extensions and generalizations in one and more variables. In this Special Issue, we invite and welcome review, expository, and original research articles dealing with the recent advances in the theory of fractional calculus and its multidisciplinary applications.

At the start of the 20th century, the upheaval in civil societies that were confronted with the shock of European armies led to a change in public health policy. In Greece, the Balkan wars, the First World War and the Greco-Turkish War brought ten years of conflict (1912–1922) during which movements of troops and refugees and a generally distressed population provided fertile ground for devastating epidemics. For the first time ever, this health, social and demographic crisis led to the advent of pro-active medical and social policies, based on late 19th century research into public health. Even though, at the time, the policies achieved little in concrete terms, they nevertheless set down the administrative, organisational and ideological foundations of the modern health system. This publication undertakes a study of this process through the influence of the French military mission and that of the Armée d’Orient, highlighting the complex interaction of the Greek and foreign actors involved in this “total war”.

This book lays out a numerical framework for the detailed description of heterogeneous chemistry, electrochemistry and porous media transport in solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFC). Assuming hydrogen as the only electrochemically active species, a modified Butler-Volmer equation is used to model the electrochemical charge transfer.

Context, Crises, Disability, Diversity, Education, Educational, Exclusion, Haiti, Inclusive, Lainy, Rochambeau, Learning, Relationships

The Dinaric Karst is a geographic region with significant natural value, a key factor in the development of tourism in this area. Natural conditions influence the need to adapt to local conditions, resulting in a specific way of life and land development which have become cultural values. The aim of this paper is to present the tourist attractions of the region together with a discussion of selected attractions, their development, and the possibility of making them available to tourists, while taking care to the authenticity of the natural and cultural landscape.

o ‘articulate’ media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What materialities might survive media’s many articulations and associations? Diverse in topic and method, the collection’s nine chapters analyse those questions of value, representation, and categorisation that are held within the languages of media. Contributors consider media technologies – following previous volumes in the Technographies series – not as mute objects addressed through language, but as processes and devices situated in the very grammars and vocabularies of their address. Scholars of literature, film, musicology, art, design theory, and media history evaluate new linguistic possibilities for thinking across disciplines and for considering the significance of location to media-critical writing. Collectively, the book traces the ways in which media vernaculars have shaped the vernaculars of media theory, and proposes a few ways in which we might reshape them.

The world’s transport network has developed over thousands of years; emerging from the need of allowing more comfortable trips to roman soldiers to the modern smooth roads enabling modern vehicles to travel at high speed and to allow heavy airplanes to take off and land safely. However, in the last two decades the world is changing very fast in terms of population growth, mobility and business trades creating greater traffic volumes and demand for minimal disruption to users, but also challenges, such as climate change and more extreme weather events. At the same time, technology development to allow a more sustainable transport sector continue apace. It is within this environment and in close consultation with key stakeholders, that this consortium developed the vision to achieve the paradigm shift to Sustainable Multifunctional Automated and Resilient Transport Infrastructures. SMARTI ETN is a training-through-research programme that empowered Europe by forming a new generation of multi-disciplinary professionals able to conceive the future of transport infrastructures and this Special Issue is a collection of some of the scientific work carried out within this context. Enjoy the read.

Speech is the most spontaneous and natural means of communication, as well as the preferred modality for interacting with mobile or fixed electronic devices, but speech in-terfaces have drawbacks, such as a lack of user privacy; non-inclusivity for certain users; poor robustness in noisy conditions; and the difficulty of creating complex man–machine interfaces. The Special Issue “Future Speech Interfaces with Sensors and Machine Intelligence” assembles eleven contributions that cover multimodal and silent speech interfaces; lip reading applications; novel sensors for speech interfaces; and enhanced speech inclusivity tools for future speech interfaces. The articles make important improvements beyond the state of the art, advancing the state of the art to new frontiers in some cases. Short summaries of all articles, grouped by topic, are presented, followed by a global commentary and evaluation.

The introduction intends to focus on the importance of raising awareness in the academic community about the various forms of discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender identity, to understand the dynamics that give rise to them and identify possible concrete actions and good practices to combat them.

Root vegetables are the sections of underground plants that are harvested and consumed by humans for their nutritional value. They are found in a wide variety of plant species. Even though botany draws a distinction between real roots and non-roots, the term “root vegetable” refers to both kinds in the context of agriculture and cuisine, despite botany classifying genuine roots as separate from non-roots. Root vegetables are often storage organs that store energy in the form of carbohydrates. This book explores recent developments in root vegetable research against the background of current and impending environmental change.

Optical devices in communication and computation have a significant impact on our daily life, although we may not even be aware of their existence, as in case of inter-continent fiber cables that connect people around the world, making it a global village. Novel nanoscale structures have demonstrated a wide range of unique features; therefore have became a hot research topic. Not only that the novel structural materials are used in biomedical therapy, but also the nature inspires the design of innovative optical structures. In this book, we focus on recent developments of theoretical analysis, designs of novel nano-photonic structures and functional materials for optical instrumentation. This book is constituted of 10 chapters contributed by renowned researchers from all over the world who work in the forefront of this field.