Open Access Books

This proceedings e-book contains papers presented at the national Symposium on “Electronic Books and the practices of scholarly research”, held in Naples, Italy, on 20 June 2003. The advent of new technologies, tools, and digital resources is changing how scholars conduct their work, keep updated in their field or fields of study, and think about research. Moving from the reconstruction of the market of scientific communication, copyright policies, and management of long-term conservation strategies, the published papers aim to discuss the ways in which scholarly practices have changed in the last decades, even since the end of the last century, in teaching and in research, in various disciplines like history, phisics and biomedical sciences.

‘The Ayes Have It’ is a fascinating account of the Queensland Parliament during three decades of high-drama politics. It examines in detail the Queensland Parliament from the days of the ‘Labor split’ in the 1950s, through the conservative governments of Frank Nicklin, John Bjelke- Petersen and Mike Ahern, to the fall of the Nationals government led briefly by Russell Cooper in December 1989. The volume traces the rough and tumble of parliamentary politics in the frontier state. The authors focus on parliament as a political forum, on the representatives and personalities that made up the institution over this period, on the priorities and political agendas that were pursued, and the increasingly contentious practices used to control parliamentary proceedings. Throughout the entire history are woven other controversies that repeatedly recur – controversies over state economic development, the provision of government services, industrial disputation and government reactions, electoral zoning and disputes over malapportionment, the impost of taxation in the ‘low tax state’, encroachments on civil liberties and political protests, the perennial topic of censorship, as well as the emerging issues of integrity, concerns about conflicts of interest and the slide towards corruption. There are fights with the federal government – especially with the Whitlam government – and internal fights within the governing coalition which eventually leads to its collapse in 1983, after which the Nationals manage to govern alone for two very tumultuous terms. On the non-government side, the bitterness of the 1950s split was reflected in the early parliaments of this period, and while the Australian Labor Party eventually saw off its rivalrous off-shoot (the QLP-DLP) it then began to implode through waves of internal factional discord.

"Trust in political parties has never been lower, but we have more and more of them, to the point where voters need magnifying sheets to read ballot papers. What is the relationship between party regulation and the nature of our democracy? How is it that parties have been able to gather so many public resources yet with so little scrutiny of their affairs? This is the first book on party regulation in Australia. It covers a wide range of issues, from party donations to candidate selection, from expectations of parties in a representative democracy to the reluctance to regulate and the role of the courts where legislators fear to tread. ‘The regulation of political parties is one of the most important, but unexplored areas of Australian electoral policy. This important book fills that gap in providing a stimulating and insightful analysis of the pitfalls and potential solutions in this area.’ — Professor George Williams AO"

Safety-critical systems with more digitalization, automation, and AI require integration of human factors to ensure safety, efficiency, and meaningful human control. Across sectors such as aviation, maritime, energy, transportation, and remote operations, accident investigations repeatedly show that failures often stem not from technology alone but from inadequate scoping, poor human-centered design, alarm overload, fragmented automation, and organizational conditions that leave operators unprepared during critical situations. Disasters such as the Boeing 737 MAX accidents demonstrate how safety can be compromised when humans and systems are misaligned, while successful recoveries (such as the US Airways Flight 1549 landing on the Hudson River) show the vital role of design-supported human performance in demanding conditions. Safety by Design: Human-Centered Approaches to AI, Automation, and Remote Operations explores the relationship between human capabilities, organizational readiness, and complex technical systems. It offers best practices for designing safety-critical systems that integrate human factors from concept to operation. The book introduces Meaningful Human Control, a framework ensuring humans retain authority, awareness, and intervention ability, aligning with emerging EU AI regulations. Readers will learn practical methods to design systems with usability, transparency, and oversight, alongside insights into automation, accident analysis, and supporting operators under stress. These principles help create safer, more resilient, and trustworthy systems. This book has been written for human factors students and specialists, system designers, engineers, safety professionals, regulators, and project managers working on safety-critical applications involving automation, AI, or remote operations. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a creative commons (CC BY) 4.0 license.

After a period of relative calm in congressional elections prior to 2006, America has experienced a series of highly competitive, volatile national elections. Since then, at least one of the US House, US Senate, and presidency has flipped party control—often with a large House or Senate seat swing—with the exception of the 2012 election. In Waves of Discontent, Jacob F. H. Smith argues that a pervasive feeling of displeasure in the American public has caused this increase in electoral volatility. Conducting statistical analyses of a wide array of surveys, Smith found that these feelings of displeasure translate to lower turnout among voters from the president’s party and a higher percentage of independents voting for the other party. Subsequently, he conducted a content analysis of New York Times articles to look at the connection between unrest in American society and seat swings in congressional elections, even before the existence of polling. Examining the consequences of volatility in congressional elections reveals that political amateurs are more likely to win in wave years than in normal years. Based on this data, Smith presents a new theory about the policy process—the policy doom loop—in which frustration among voters at both the inability of Congress to pass policy and anger at policies that actually do pass results in even more churn in congressional elections. Waves of Discontent offers some suggestions to promote constructive policymaking efforts in Washington to reduce frustration in the electorate.

Die 1972 von den Frankfurter Slavisten Olexa Horbatsch und Gerd Freidhof begründete Reihe Specimina philologiae Slavicae wird heute von Holger Kuße (Dresden), Peter Kosta (Potsdam), Beatrix Kreß (Hildesheim), Franz Schindler (Gießen), Barbara Sonnenhauser (Zürich) und Nadine Thielemann (Wien) herausgeben. In der Reihe erscheinen Monographien, Sammelbände und Lehrbücher zu allen Gebieten der Slavistik, der Sprach-, der Literatur- und der Kulturwissenschaft. In der Sprachwissenschaft erscheinen sowohl sprachhistorische als auch innovative Arbeiten zur Pragmatik und Semantik, zu slavischen Kleinsprachen und zur Diskurslinguistik. In der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft gehört zu den besonderen Interessensgebieten die Russische Philosophie.

Courts with the right to constitutional review exert considerable power in a political system. However, especially for Kelsenian constitutional courts there are hardly any large-N studies. This is mainly due to a lack of data. For the German Federal Constitutional Court, this gap has been closed by building a novel database, the development of which is depicted in this book. Employing data from this database, the occurrence of separate opinions in general and their different types in particular are analyzed. The book introduces a new, universal theory that reconciles and expands existing explanations. In a second step, the theory is applied to the German Federal Constitutional Court. It can be proven that one factor that has been neglected so far plays a decisive role: The judges' behavior depends on the profession they pursue after their time in office. Moreover, the study shows that -- contrary to the common literature -- it is not mainly the topic that determines a case's conflict potential but rather the number of issues a decision has to address.

A strict ban on egg donation is unjustified in a liberal society. Yet, egg donation is nevertheless fraught with problems that should not be ignored. This work examines those problems from a moral philosophical perspective and identifies frameworks for dealing with egg donation appropriately. In addition, numerous interfaces with other reproductive procedures are highlighted.

Digital Stylistics is an area of research at the intersection of Literary Studies, Linguistics, Digital Humanities, and Computational Literary Studies. It is concerned with the computational and statistical analysis of literary style and of style in language use. This volume brings together research in Digital Stylistics from Romance Studies and beyond, contributing to new methods and applications in different language contexts and literatures. All the research results are based on the empirical, computational analysis of literary corpora chosen to analyze major genres or subgenres of poetry, drama, and prose from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Politics and government; Economic policy; Japan

Science Under the Yoke of Value examines how science today is fundamentally governed not by an autonomous quest for knowledge and truth, or by the advancement of society, but by coercion to cater to a machinery that feeds on, and in its turn produces, self‑implicating values of “quality”, “impact”, or “productivity”, with disruptive consequences for scientific life as a whole. Drawing on phenomenological analysis and the insights of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Galilei, Kant, Husserl, Einstein, Heidegger, and Arendt, this book exposes how scholarly pursuits worldwide have become subjugated by non‑scientific values. It challenges the uncritical acceptance of evaluation practices that threaten to transform academia into a self‑perpetuating system where scholars labour under what the authors aptly term “the yoke of value”. Readers will gain profound insights into the philosophical underpinnings of academic evaluation, moving beyond common discussions of “bureaucratization” or “corporatization” to question the very concept of value that drives these systems. This book uniquely interrogates why enormous resources are devoted to evaluation systems without examining whether these values truly serve science or society, thereby diverting attention from the true menace to present‑day scientific enquiry. This critical analysis helps scholars understand the mechanisms that “magically” prevent questioning of the system itself, offering a framework to recognize how scientific autonomy has been compromised and what this means for the advancement of knowledge. This volume will appeal to STEM scholars, philosophers, and social scientists alike, interested in scientific integrity and the autonomy of research. University administrators, policymakers, and anyone concerned with the purposes and trajectory of scientific research in contemporary society will find this analysis essential for understanding the current crisis in scientific and academic life. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license

This paper investigates the potential of data-mediated reflective practice for teachers, members of the eTwinning professional community, within a research strategy that explores big data in education. The chapter begins by emphasising the potential of online communities for the professional development of teachers. It provides an example of a qualitative research method used, in conjunction with a data-driven strategy in order to identify significant challenges and recommendations for the advancement of the eTwinning online community in Italy. Finally, it focuses on the analytical explanation of the findings and offers some concluding remarks on the significance of the emerging development dimensions.

In a society that aims above all to safeguard life, how might we reckon with ethical responsibility when we are complicit in sacrificial economies that produce and tolerate death as a necessity of life? Arguing that biopower can be fully exposed only through an analysis of those whom society has “let die,” Stuart J. Murray employs a series of transdisciplinary case studies to uncover the structural and rhetorical conditions through which biopower works. These case studies include the concept of “sacrifice” in the “war” against COVID-19, where emergent cultures of pandemic “resistance” are explored alongside suicide bombings and military suicides; the California mass hunger strikes of 2013; legal cases involving “preventable” and “untimely” childhood deaths, exposing the irreconcilable claims of anti-vaxxers and Indigenous peoples; and the videorecording of the death of a disabled Black man. Murray demonstrates that active resistance to biopower inevitably reproduces tropes of “making live” and “letting die.” His counter to this fact is a critical stance of disaffirmation, one in which death disrupts the politics of life itself. A philosophically nuanced critique of biopower, The Living from the Dead is a meditation on life, death, power, language, and control in the twenty-first century. It will appeal to students and scholars of rhetoric, philosophy, and critical theory.

This book explores game production across regional, national and global contexts. Notably, the widespread adoption of remote working practices in the video games sector challenged the entrenched idea of place-based industry clusters. The theme of “clustering” as a process enables analysis across scales, placing local games industries in the context of global forces and wider creative industries at a time of significant dynamism and change. Focusing on the idea of the video game production cluster, this book draws upon academic research, across creative industries and innovation clusters in multiple regional and national contexts, to explore the contribution of multidisciplinary, cultural influence, diversity and cluster infrastructure to business success. Through 17 scholarly chapters and three expert interviews, Creative Clustering and the Video Games Industry highlights the crucial interactions between universities, creative research and development, and cross-sector innovation in driving the future of the games industry. This essential collection will establish current knowledge and methods for understanding video game creative clusters in context.

Im Gegensatz zu dem Anspruch vieler Controller, sich zunehmend als unternehmensinterne Berater in Fragen der Planung, Steuerung und Kontrolle zu profilieren, wird Controlling von seinen internen Adressaten vielfach noch unzureichend als serviceorientierte Dienstleistung wahrgenommen. Controlling – im Sinne von Führungsunterstützung – kann sachgerecht nur über eine konsequente Orientierung an den Informationsbedürfnissen und Koordinationserfordernissen des Managements geleistet werden. Ziel der Arbeit ist daher, die potenzielle Kundenorientierung im Controlling einer differenzierten Betrachtung zu unterziehen, um gestaltungsrelevante Tatbestände zu identifizieren und Anwendungsvoraussetzungen ausgewählter betriebswirtschaftlicher Instrumente darzustellen.