Open Access Books

Rather than theoretical or abstract, above all else, this monograph endeavors to serve as a practical guide, a handbook for helping us navigate a dark terrain. It neither presumes to examine the sources of evil nor suggest radical cures. These pages strive only to continue the process of naming the signs of individual evil that we might recognize these persons before they inflict even more damage. Scott Peck says it best. “If evil were easy to recognize, identify, and manage, there would be no need for this book.” Of course, he was referring to his own pioneering treatise; given the realities of our day, the need remains as great as ever.

Mathematics is a fundamental part of human thought and the literature highlights its need for reflective citizens in order to better understand people, the society and the world. It actually encourages logical reasoning and mental rigor, playing a crucial role in understanding the contents of other school subjects. This book collects papers, submitted at IV edition of the Seminar “INVALSI data: a research and teaching tool” held in Rome from 29th November to 1st December 2019, by both teachers and researchers about the didactics of mathematics, to debate and deepen this topic, sharing ideas, suggestions, and experiences. INVALSI data could be a useful tool to find new paths to help schools to improve teaching and learning process, indeed.

Sexual violence attains a high level of public attention, almost daily the media report about it. Also for the crime and justice policy, it was always a reason to discuss the sharpening and expansion of sentences. More astonishing is that hardly anyone has examined why relatively many persons is suspected of sexual violence, but only a small percentage is ever sentenced. This volume is intended to provide new insights by describing on the one hand the identified issues, and on the other hand analysing identification processes, selection processes and sentencing. This will be based on a census of investigations in two court districts in Lower Saxony.

"With a combined focus on social democrats in Northern and Southern Europe, this book crucially broadens our understanding of the transformation of European social democracy from the mid-1970s to the early-1990s. In doing so, it revisits the transformation of this ideological family at the end of the Cold War, and before the launch of Third Way politics, and examines the dynamics and power relations at play among European social democratic parties in a context of nascent globalization. The chronological, methodological and geographical approaches adopted allow for a more nuanced narrative of change for European social democracy than the hitherto dominant centric perspective. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of social democracy, the European Centre-left, political parties, ideologies, and more broadly to comparative politics and European politics and history."

In der Schweiz sind transreligiöse Unterbringungen in evangelikale Pflegefamilien eine verbreitete Praxis. Rechtlich obliegt jedoch den Herkunftseltern als Inhabern der elterlichen Sorge die religiöse Erziehung des Kindes, bis dieses sechzehn Jahre alt ist. Da der Missionsauftrag ein Kernelement des Evangelikalismus ist, ergibt sich hier ein Spannungsfeld. Mithilfe qualitativer Methoden zeigt Noëmi J. van Oordt multiperspektivisch auf, wie Fachpersonen der Pflegekinderhilfe diesem mit informellen Regeln zwar zu begegnen versuchen, die vorgesehene religiöse Erziehung aber trotzdem missachtet und die Identitätsentwicklung der Pflegekinder durch die evangelikale Erziehung tangiert wird.

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.

Already by the Late Bronze Age, culturally distinct cults of Kubaba existed throughout the region controlled by the Hittite Empire. After the fall of the empire and the fragmentation of the political landscape of the Syro-Anatolian region, these cults persisted in local contexts, developing along their own trajectories, and thus producing hypostases of the goddess with unique roles, modes of expression, and perhaps aliases. However, these local variations did not evolve in a vacuum, but in many cases through a process of interregional and intercultural interactions. This paper will examine these processes along with the resultant expressions of local cults of Kubaba, demonstrating specific trajectories for interactions between neighboring groups, along with selective adaptations and rejections of foreign cultic concepts. Preliminary results suggest an interesting convergence between these cults and certain sociolinguistic boundaries within the region, perhaps connected to communities with shared group identities.

A large part of the global workforce is said to be Christians, but what does it mean to be a Christian at work? This study offers a review of relevant research from management and organisation studies as well as from theology; it reports on fieldwork among business managers in Switzerland and proposes an embodiment perspective on Christians at work. The author identifies difficulties relating to the predominant uses of terms such as faith, spirituality and religion at work, and argues for the importance of taking Christians’ framing practices and bodily forms of existence into account. By participating in a bodily form in Christ’s death and resurrection, and by thus practising Christ’s body, Christians find themselves located at an existential nerve centre for carrying out work activities. This study shows how the notion of ‘Christians’ can open up conceptual space for relevant organisational, managerial, sociological, ethical and theological aspects concerning contemporary work settings.

This is an open access book that covers the complete set of experiences and results of the FemTech.dk research which we have had conducted between 2016-2021 – from initiate idea to societal communication. Diversity in Computer Science: Design Artefacts for Equity and Inclusion presents and documents the principles, results, and learnings behind the research initiative FemTech.dk, which was created in 2016 and continues today as an important part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen’s strategic development for years to come. FemTech.dk was created in 2016 to engage with research within gender and diversity and to explore the role of gender equity as part of digital technology design and development. FemTech.dk considers how and why computer science as a field and profession in Denmark has such a distinct unbalanced gender representation in the 21st century. This book is also the story of how we (the authors) as computer science researchers embarked on a journey to engage with a new research field – equity and gender in computing – about which we had only sporadic knowledge when we began. We refer here to equity and gender in computing as a research field – but in reality, this research field is a multiplicity of entangled paths, concepts, and directions that forms important and critical insights about society, gender, politics, and infrastructures which are published in different venues and often have very different sets of criteria, values, and assumptions. Thus, part of our journey is also to learn and engage with all these different streams of research, concepts, and theoretical approaches and, through these engagements, to identify and develop our own theoretical platform, which has a foundation in our research backgrounds in Human–Computer Interaction broadly – and Interaction Design & Computer Supported Cooperative Work specifically.

governance;politics;Sustainable development goals;sustainability;technological change

Die „Grundlagenuntersuchungen zum selektiven Elektronenstrahlschmelzen von TiAl6V4“ thematisieren den Einfluss der Prozess-, Geometrie- und Scanparameter bei der additiven Fertigung mittels Elektronenstrahl. Die Prozessparameter werden dabei systematisch variiert, um den Energieeintrag, abhängig von der Geometrie und Scanstrategie zu untersuchen. Für die Auswertung werden die Bauteildichte, die Legierungszusammensetzung, die Mikrostruktur und die mechanischen Eigenschaften der Proben bestimmt. Dabei kommt neben der metallographischen Untersuchung, die Prozessbeobachtung mit einer Hochgeschwindigkeitskamera zur Beobachtung des Schmelz¬vorganges zum Einsatz. Numerische Simulationen unterstützen die Auswertung der Interpretation und geben Aufschluss über die extrem schnellen Schmelz- und Erstarrungsprozesse. Das gewonnene Prozessverständnis dient der Entwicklung von Prozessfenstern für die zuverlässige Herstellung von Bauteilen. Darüber hinaus werden Scanstrategien zur Einstellung der Bauteileigenschaften aufgezeigt.

Human-computer interaction

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences.

The Archaeology of Fazzan is a major series of reports on the archaeology and history of Libya’s south-west desert region. This volume contains reports and analysis on a series of excavations carried out between 1958 and 1977 by the British archaeologist Charles Daniels, lavishly illustrated by site plans and numerous colour photographs – particularly of the rich artefact assemblages recovered. The publication will be high profile and a significant landmark in work seeking to record information about Libya’s long-term Saharan heritage. It will be an indispensable reference work to the nature of the Libya’s Saharan archaeology. The work will be of major value to the Libyan antiquities service and contracted archaeologists in concert with foreign oil companies, the NOC and the GMMR, and other similar major schemes. The key element of the story of Fazzan is the existence here of an early Libyan civilisation, the Garamantes, and the publication of the Archaeology of Fazzan volumes is putting in the public domain a rich dossier of information about their antecedents and descendants in this desert environment. This was a singularly important moment in Libya’s cultural history, with resonances also in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is great interest in the published volumes from specialists in Saharan, Sub-Saharan and Mediterranean archaeologists and historians as for the first time we can see in detail the effect of early Trans-Saharan links.

From the early days of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, a Eurocentric view of Christian teaching was a primary tool in the subjugation and domination of native populations. Since 1921 Kimbanguism, an African Initiated Church, has advocated a reconstruction of Blackness by appropriating the parameters of Christian identity. The prophet Simon Kimbangu, the founder of the movement, has inspired 17 million followers with Pan-African messages of political and spiritual liberation. The Spurned Race is the first comprehensive study of Kimbanguism since the pioneering books of the 1980s. The son of a Kimbanguist pastor, Gampiot uses his inside resources to offer new sociological and theological analyses of the church’s interpretation of and signification on the Christian bible. The Spurned Race provides a unique and important look at the independent nature of early African Christian prophetic movements.