Open Access Books

Today's society appears increasingly vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. In this context, there is an increased need to create efficient and effective ecosystems to locally promote the quality of life and social innovation. The volume offers an excursus of the main innovative practices and policies used within urban development. Each essay explores an area of interest (quality of life, social innovation and sharing economy, smart city, urban mobility, new workplaces, shared living, eHealth, urban security, youth and tourism, food policy, didactic innovation and shared administration) offering a reference overview for the study, design and implementation of new intervention strategies and public policies. This text is aimed at students, teachers and operators working in different positions within the social sectors.

Der Falsche Mehltau bedroht den ökologischen Anbau verschiedener Kulturen, wie Wein, Hopfen und einiger Obst- und Gemüsesorten. Zur Bekämpfung der Pflanzenkrankheit wurde bisher auf kupferhaltige Fungizide zurückgegriffen. Aufgrund der Anreicherung des Schwermetalls im Boden und seiner negativen Auswirkungen auf Vögel, Kleinsäuger und Regenwürmer fordert die Europäische Union eine Reduktion und zieht sogar ein Verbot in Betracht, sobald eine umweltfreundliche Alternative zur Verfügung steht. Damit weiterhin eine ökologische Produktion möglich bleibt, mussten neue wirksame Substanzen gefunden werden. Auf der Suche nach Alternativen konnte einem Extrakt aus den Dolden des Hopfens eine fungizide Wirkung gegen den Falschen Mehltau nachgewiesen werden. Damit der hochviskose, schlecht wasserlösliche und instabile Extrakt als Pflanzenschutzmittel eingesetzt werden kann, müssen die Produkteigenschaften an die Anwendung angepasst werden. Im Rahmen dieser Forschungsarbeit wurde die Mikroverkapselung als Formulierungsmethode gewählt, um den Hopfenextrakt in ein anwendbares und wirksames Pulver zu verwandeln, das einen möglichst lange anhaltenden Schutz bieten soll. Mithilfe der Sprüherstarrung wurden die Wirkstoffe in Lipid-Matrixkapseln eingebaut. Additive, wie Emulgatoren, Dispergiermittel und Antioxidantien, wurden verwendet, um die Kapseleigenschaften für die Anforderungen im Pflanzenschutz zu optimieren. Anhand von Blattscheibenversuchen konnte gezeigt werden, dass die entwickelten Kapselprototypen eine Infektion mit dem Schaderreger verhindern können. Die Untersuchungen lieferten den Beleg, dass mithilfe der Mikroverkapselung ein vielversprechendes biologisches Pflanzenschutzmittel aus dem Hopfenextrakt entwickelt wurde, welches in Zukunft Kupfer ersetzen könnte.

Yet another book on witches and witchcraft? Although numerous, studies on this phenomenon that had such a profound influence on the political, social and religious history of the late Middle Ages and the early modern age in Europe can never be enough. At this time the political regimes were actively involved in the witch hunts, not least the Catholic church which was intensely engaged in developing instruments of control aimed at governing and curbing dissent. The book is broken down into thematic sections – rules, treatises and trials, transmission /possession – which reflect the multiplicity of the scientific proposals that have emerged in recent years, and also represent a conscious preliminary orientation of possible readings. At centre stage of the witchcraft show are the witches and their judges, from the theologians and philosophers to the exorcists. As well as addressing actual events, the book also explores the nature of the beliefs and the way in which they were transmitted in the various social strata, and the phenomenon of diabolical possession which conveyed the message of the presence of the devil in the world.

The volume offers an inventory of contemporary experimental cultures in the conflicting area between science and design and outlines a praxeology of the experiment.

This edited collection brings together original empirical and theoretical insights into the complex set of relations which exist between age, gender, sexualities and the media in Europe. This book investigates how engagements with media reflect people’s constructions and understandings of gender in society, as well as articulations of age in relation to gender and sexuality; the ways in which negotiations of gender and sexuality inform people’s practices with media, and not least how mediated representations may reinforce or challenge social hierarchies based in differences of gender, sexual orientation and age. In doing so, it showcases new and innovative research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. Including contributions from both established and early career scholars across Europe, it engages with a wide range of hotly debated topics within the context of gender, sexuality and the media, informing academic, public and policy agendas. This collection will be of interest to students and researchers in gender studies, media studies, film and television, cultural studies, sexuality, ageing, sociology and education.

This open access edited volume brings together a multidisciplinary team of scholars to investigate the concept of transformative development through decolonial approaches to language, literatures, and pedagogies. Contributors discuss the transformative development vision with a focus on language, literature and education. In doing so, they investigate the contribution of Wolof to the transformative development of postcolonial Senegal, analyse the impact of endonormativity on the transformation of Cameroon, and explore the impact of AI technologies such as ChatGPT on decolonial research and teaching in Africa. They discuss the transformative potential of oral and written African literature, the importance of values-based civic education and decolonizing continuous professional development for teachers, and the role of culturally sensitive curriculum around EFL. Going beyond traditional emphases on economic and industrial progress, the authors gathered here ultimately develop new analytical frameworks that align with African realities and priorities in order to promote the decolonisation of the African minds, which remains a work in progress. 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 by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

The EU-AITF promotes infrastructure investment in sub-Saharan Africa and thereby helps eradicate poverty and stimulate sustainable economic growth. The Fund works by blending grants, provided by donors, and long-term financing, provided by participating financiers. This report gives an overview of its achievements from 2007 to 2019.

The Getty Fiend, a contemporary medieval melodrama set in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, takes the reader on a tour filled with rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints, all seen through the keenly dramatic flair of a collector’s eye. A cinematic and labyrinthine take on pulp horror, Ken White’s screenplay-in-verse is a monster mash-up of forms and languages, facades and carnal catastrophes, archaic languages and misplaced rhetorics—a campy, fantastical gender-bending transformation into the inadvertently divine.

"Welche Rolle spielten Überlebende politischer Verfolgung des Nationalsozialismus im Ost-West-Konflikt? Ehemalige Verfolgte des Nationalsozialismus spielten in der Nachkriegszeit eine wichtige politische, soziale und kulturelle Rolle. Es waren vor allem sie – in erster Linie ehemalige politische Häftlinge sowie Angehörige des Widerstands – und ihre zahlreichen Organisationen, die für die Erinnerung an Widerstand und Konzentrationslager, für eine Aufklärung der Öffentlichkeit und besonders der nachwachsenden Generationen, für eine Bestrafung der Täter und für die Rechte der Verfolgten eintraten. Überlebende waren zudem auf beiden Seiten in den Kampagnen des Kalten Krieges engagiert und setzten sich früh mit dem Rechtsextremismus auseinander. Dabei waren sie grenzüberschreitend aktiv und zählten zu den Akteuren mit Verbindungen über den »Eisernen Vorhang«. Maximilian Becker untersucht am Beispiel der kommunistisch dominierten Internationalen Föderation der Widerstandskämpfer (FIR), des bedeutendsten internationalen Verfolgtenverbands mit Mitgliedern aus Ost und West sowie Israel, diese transnationalen Verbindungen und Aktivitäten. Der Einsatz für »Frieden« war dabei zentral und machte die FIR zur Propagandaagentur im Dienste des Ostblocks und zur Vertreterin politischer Interessen Überlebender."

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. More than half of the world's children grow up in Asia, a continent currently undergoing rapid economic and social change. Yet the voices of young people in Asian countries have received far too little attention. Providing a much-needed contribution to the field of childhood studies, The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies sets a new agenda in a research landscape that has so far lacked an overarching conceptual framework for illuminating Asian childhoods. Adopting a systematic and comprehensive approach, this pioneering handbook profiles Asian childhoods and youth embedded within their distinctive families and societies as well as in more universal contexts. Locating young people in a variety of social structures, chapters highlight and interrogate strong intergenerational obligations across Asian cultures, even as Asian societies undergo rapid economic change, political transformation, and mass migration. Prioritising Asian youth’s perspectives and contributions and revising established analytical frameworks of research,The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies equips readers with an understanding of the complex interplay between local and global conditions and private and public actors in Asian countries.

Orbital debris is becoming an increasing problem for space flight missions. New satellite launches, explosions, collisions and other events cause a steady rise in the number of objects orbiting the Earth. It is therefore important to determine the future development of the object population, as well as the effectiveness of debris mitigation measures, in long-term simulations. Orbital propagation, the calculation of an object's movement in its orbit, poses a challenge for this research due to the high computation times of the complex perturbation models involved. With populations consisting of hundreds of thousands of objects as well as simulation time frames of up to 200 years, these calculations can take up hours of computation time. To speed up this process, the analytical propagator Ikebana is introduced in this work of applied computer science in engineering. The program runs on graphics processing units, hardware designed for massively parallel execution of up to thousands of concurrent threads. This reduces the overall run time for large object populations from hours to minutes. Porting software from a conventional CPU is not a trivial task and involves a number of potential pitfalls and optimization opportunities which are detailed in this work. The propagator is integrated into other applications via a generic, multi-platform interface specifically designed for this task. It allows to develop the propagator separately and integrate it into other tools as a plugin at run time. The interface's architecture serves as a design template for analytical propagation software.

Jaime Manrique weaves into his own memoir the lives of three important twentieth-century Hispanic writers: the Argentine Manuel Puig, author of Kiss of the Spider Woman; the Cuban Reinaldo Arenas, author of Before Night Falls; and Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca.

Il plane sur le projet européen, depuis les origines, un lourd soupçon : présenté comme l’expression de l’intérêt général européen, il ne serait, dans le fond, qu’un complot des élites, destiné à servir leurs intérêts propres et à promouvoir leur vision du monde, au mépris et aux dépens des aspirations populaires. De prime abord, ce phénomène a pu paraître normal : toute communauté politique n’est-elle pas, dans sa phase fondatrice, soutenue par une élite agissante ? Toutefois, dans le cas de l’Union européenne, la fracture européenne s’est stabilisée, voire durcie. On en veut pour preuve les critiques très virulentes dont le traité constitutionnel – rêvé comme un moment de socialisation politique favorable au projet européen – a fait l’objet lors de sa ratification. Les peurs d’une Europe perçue comme un mécanisme de modernisation politique et économique insensible aux intérêts des secteurs les plus exposés, aux traditions et aux valeurs dont les territoires et les communautés morales sont porteuses, n’ont jamais été plus fortes qu’aujourd’hui. Confrontés à ce rejet, et après avoir invoqué sans succès les registres de légitimation les plus divers, les dirigeants européens avouent leur perplexité. Cet ouvrage n’a pas pour ambition de leur indiquer la voie d’une réduction de la fracture européenne, mais de mieux poser les questions. Il réunit pour cela des contributions de quelques-uns des meilleurs spécialistes francophones des études européennes. Partant chacun de leur objet d’étude particulier, ils apportent des réponses aux mêmes questions : le procès en élitisme fait à la construction européenne relève-t-il du préjugé, ou est-il fondé ? Si elle est avérée, quelle est la mesure de cette fracture, et comment s’explique-t-elle ?

Political and historical essays on the Mapuche population in Chile and its recognition as a nation