Open Access Books

This book draws a sociological portrait of the age group born in the 1970s in Estonia and discusses its generational features and constructions. This cohort’s coming of age coincided with the social and emotional turmoil of the re-independence movement in the late 1980s and with the transformation of society in the 1990s. This was the first cohort to negotiate its transition to adulthood in the new society, starting some new patterns of socialization, while also sharing some practices and experiences with older cohorts. Based on qualitative interviews as well as an analysis of media discourses and statistical data, the book traces the emergence of a new generation that draws its very own lessons from the past and from the social transformations that influenced life courses and careers. The book provides an intriguing discussion of socialization patterns and generation formation against the backdrop of post-socialist transformation. In addition, it provides a fascinating insight into the mind-set and experiences of a generation in the making, already shaping today’s society and culture.

The Mittani empire is one of the most enigmatic political structures in Mesopotamian history. Reconstructing the emergence and the organisation of this state, whose territory encompassed Upper Mesopotamia touching the Levant and the piedmont plains of the Zagros in the East at the height of its power, is exceedingly difficult. Cuneiform specialists, archeologists and historians discuss the Mittani state with regard to modes of spatial organisation co- and preexisting in the region.

Alzheimer's Disease Pathogenesis: Core Concepts, Shifting Paradigms, and Therapeutic Targets, delivers the concepts embodied within its title. This exciting book presents the full array of theories about the causes of Alzheimer's, including fresh concepts that have gained ground among both professionals and the lay public. Acknowledged experts provide highly informative yet critical reviews of the factors that most likely contribute to Alzheimer's, including genetics, metabolic deficiencies, oxidative stress, and possibly environmental exposures. Evidence that Alzheimer's resembles a brain form of diabetes is discussed from different perspectives, ranging from disease mechanisms to therapeutics. This book is further energized by discussions of how neurotransmitter deficits, neuro-inflammation, and oxidative stress impair neuronal plasticity and contribute to Alzheimer's neurodegeneration. The diversity of topics presented in just the right depth will interest clinicians and researchers alike. This book inspires confidence that effective treatments could be developed based upon the expanding list of potential therapeutic targets.

In Terms of Exchange. Economies of Difference in Works by Marlen Haushofer, Ingeborg Bachmann and Hélène Cixous analyses texts by two Austrian woman writers, Marlen Haushofer and Ingeborg Bachmann, as well as French writer and theorist Hélène Cixous. Cixous’ texts are not read here as meta- or secondary texts to be applied to Haushofer’s and Bachmann’s writing, but as a voice equal to theirs. . Alongside a critical overview of the common narratives in Haushofer, Bachmann and Cixous reception, this study analyses selected motifs from the authors’ texts and sheds light on the economies of their writing processes as well as those of the manuscripts and typoscripts of Die Mansarde and Das Buch Franza.

Children and companion animals seem to have a natural affinity towards each other. Most children desire a relationship with their own companion animals or at least demonstrate an interest to interact with animals in general. Living with companion animals or interacting with animals may have psychosocial, neurobiological, or medically relevant effects on typically developing children and juveniles as well as those with diverse and special needs.In this eBook, we present several articles addressing the relationships between children/juveniles and animals in different countries, including Austria, Germany, Jamaica, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Three articles discuss approaches in animal-assisted education, including animal keeping and animal assisted interventions in schools, and an experimental study investigating immediate effects of dogs on reading competence and accompanying stress reactions with cortisol and behavior. Other articles address topics involving children and their companion animals, including dog-walking by children and juveniles, risks of dog bites by the family dog, selection of pet dogs for families with a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the relationships that children with ASD have with their family cats. The interactions between children/juveniles and animals addressed in this eBook provide new insights into some scarcely investigated themes, and underline the significance of animals in children's lives.

20 years in conception and 15 in construction, the SpiNNaker project has delivered the world’s largest neuromorphic computing platform incorporating over a million ARM mobile phone processors and capable of modelling spiking neural networks of the scale of a mouse brain in biological real time. This machine, hosted at the University of Manchester in the UK, is freely available under the auspices of the EU Flagship Human Brain Project. This book tells the story of the origins of the machine, its development and its deployment, and the immense software development effort that has gone into making it openly available and accessible to researchers and students the world over. It also presents exemplar applications from ‘Talk’, a SpiNNaker-controlled robotic exhibit at the Manchester Art Gallery as part of ‘The Imitation Game’, a set of works commissioned in 2016 in honour of Alan Turing, through to a way to solve hard computing problems using stochastic neural networks. The book concludes with a look to the future, and the SpiNNaker-2 machine which is yet to come.

The nowadays ubiquitous and effortless digital data capture and processing capabilities offered by the majority of devices, lead to an unprecedented penetration of multimedia content in our everyday life. To make the most of this phenomenon, the rapidly increasing volume and usage of digitised content requires constant re-evaluation and adaptation of multimedia methodologies, in order to meet the relentless change of requirements from both the user and system perspectives. Advances in Multimedia provides readers with an overview of the ever-growing field of multimedia by bringing together various research studies and surveys from different subfields that point out such important aspects. Some of the main topics that this book deals with include: multimedia management in peer-to-peer structures & wireless networks, security characteristics in multimedia, semantic gap bridging for multimedia content and novel multimedia applications.

"Several interdisciplinary studies highlight imperfect information as a possible explanation of skill mismatches, which in turn has implications for unemployment and informality rates. Despite information failures and their consequences, countries like Colombia (where informality and unemployment rates are high) lack a proper labour market information system to identify skill mismatches and employer skill requirements. One reason for this absence is the cost of collecting labour market data. Recently, the potential use of online job portals as a source of labour market information has gained the attention of researchers and policymakers, since these portals can provide quick and relatively low-cost data collection. As such, these portals could be of use for Colombia. However, debates continue about the efficacy of this use, particularly concerning the robustness of the collected data. This book implements a novel mixed-methods approach (such as web scraping, text mining, machine learning, etc.) to investigate to what extent a web-based model of skill mismatches can be developed for Colombia. The main contribution of this book is demonstrating that, with the proper techniques, job portals can be a robust source of labour market information. In doing so, it also contributes to current knowledge by developing a conceptual and methodological approach to identify skills, occupations, and skill mismatches using online job advertisements, which would otherwise be too complex to be collected and analysed via other means. By applying this novel methodology, this study provides new empirical data on the extent and nature of skill mismatches in Colombia for a considerable set of non-agricultural occupations in the urban and formal economy. Moreover, this information can be used as a complement to household surveys to monitor potential skill shortages. Thus, the findings are useful for policymakers, statisticians, and education and training providers, among others."

Ce volume réunit deux textes, inédits en français moderne, d’un des plus grands humanistes du xve siècle, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, qui deviendra pape sous le nom de Pie II en 1458. Les Misères des gens de cour est une critique acérée, sous les traits d’une satire ravageuse, de la vie de cour, école de désillusion pour tous ceux – intellectuels et autres – qui côtoient le pouvoir et ses fallacieux miroirs aux alouettes. C’est dire l’actualité de ce court traité de « savoir-survivre » à la cour des puissants. De l’esclavage des élites aux aléas de la Fortune qui récompense souvent les mauvais au détriment des vertueux, il n’y a qu’un pas : dans Le Songe de Fortune, Piccolomini s’interroge sur cette déesse capricieuse, qui fait et défait le destin des individus et des empires. Rien n’est stable en ce monde, mais la victoire, souvent provisoire, appartient à ceux qui osent défier la fatalité. Insérés dans la réalité politique et culturelle du xve siècle, ces deux textes au style percutant invitent néanmoins à réfléchir sur les asservissements qui menacent toute société civilisée.

Né en 1947 à Canton, dans le Sud de la Chine, Hou Hsiao-hsien et sa famille, dans une période particulièrement trouble, se réfugient dès 1948 sur l'île de Taiwan. C'est là où il grandit, devient vite orphelin et cède à la délinquance avant de découvrir le cinéma. Dans les années 1980 il devient l'un des principaux cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague taiwanaise. Ces années d'apprentissage, comptant déjà quelques grandes réussites (notamment Un temps pour vivre, un temps pour mourir) précédent la reconnaissance internationale. Le Lion d'or obtenu en 1989 pour La Cité des douleurs consacre en effet un cinéaste qui comptera parmi les plus importants des années 1990 et 2000. Entre films consacrés à l'histoire de Taiwan, films autobiographiques, films montrant la jeunesse contemporaine et expériences à l'étranger, les œuvres marquant profondément cette période et unanimement saluées par la critique sont nombreuses : Le Maître de marionnettes, Goodbye South, Goodbye, Millennium Mambo ou encore Café Lumière. En s'interrogeant plus particulièrement sur le traitement de l'espace, du temps et du son à l'œuvre dans l'ensemble de la filmographie du cinéaste taiwanais, les 14 textes constituant cet ouvrage collectif tentent de mettre en évidence les qualités formelles de l'un des plus grands cinéastes de notre temps.

The expulsion of the Moriscos from Habsburg Spain between 1609 and 1614 represents the largest expulsion of a minority in Europe in the early modern period, an important episode of ethnic, political and religious cleansing which affected about 300,000 forced migrants. This book studies for the first time how this group, which was affected by discrimination, religious persecution, and repression, displayed physical and spiritual resilience and prepared themselves for imminent radical measures by forming networks which helped them before, during, and after the expulsion to contact authorities in France, Italy, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in order to ask for help and to establish themselves in the news lands and form Diaspora communities which in many places have remained visible until today. Contributors are Luis F. Bernabé Pons, Hossain Bouzineb, Houssem Eddine Chachia, Mercedes García-Arenal, Catherine Infante, Tijana Krstić, Amine Oulad Lmaroudia, Bruno Pomara, Barbara Ruiz-Bejarano, Ana Struillou, and Gerard Wiegers.

Il volume presenta i risultati di una rierca internazionale sul fenomeno dei lavoratori vulnerabili (under24 e over55)

Die freie Verfügbarkeit dieser E-Book-Ausgabe auf Basis einer CC BY 4.0-Lizenz wurde ermöglicht durch die ZBW – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft.

This open access book addresses the current disillusionment with mass higher education and argues that it is based on a profound misunderstanding of its educational potential. The authors analyse a seven-year longitudinal research project that tracked participants who studied chemistry or chemical engineering from their first year of university until up to three years after they graduated. Drawing on over 700 interviews with students/graduates from two English, two South African and two American universities, the book explores the educational intentions of their degree programmes, what participants wanted to get out of going to university and studying for a degree, how their views of knowledge and the world changed, and what they felt they had gained from going to university. The book argues that the educational potential of higher education lies, not in graduate salaries or employability, but in the ways in which engaging with structured bodies of knowledge changes students’ understanding of the world and what they can do in it. The authors consider the implications of this argument for how the educational role of higher education is understood by students, graduates, universities, and policymakers and how this understanding might be drawn upon to counter the damaging disillusionment with mass higher education that appears to be growing in many countries. 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 UKRI.

Grundbildung ist eine wesentliche Voraussetzung zur Teilhabe an gesellschaftlichen Kontexten. Doch häufig haben Menschen mit einem niedrigen Bildungsniveau negative Lernerfahrungen zu Schulzeiten gemacht. Weiterbildungsmöglichkeiten begegnen sie daher mit Skepsis und erleben wenige Zugänge zu den Angeboten. Das Buch zeigt, wie bildungsbenachteiligte Erwachsene einen individuell angemessenen und sie selbst motivierenden Zugang zu Grund- und Weiterbildungsmaßnahmen erhalten können. Die Autoren beschreiben die Gestaltung von Angeboten in regionalen Netzwerken und leiten hieraus Forderungen an die Bildungspolitik ab. Das Buch richtet sich an Verantwortliche und Lehrende in Bildungseinrichtungen, Bildungsberater, Bildungspolitiker sowie weitere pädagogische Fachkräfte. Mit einem Vorwort von Rita Süssmuth.