Open Access Books

This open access book constitutes revised selected papers from the 4th International Workshop on Brain-Inspired Computing, BrainComp 2019, held in Cetraro, Italy, in July 2019. The 11 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. They deal with research on brain atlasing, multi-scale models and simulation, HPC and data infra-structures for neuroscience as well as artificial and natural neural architectures.

Los análisis genéticos y el convenio de la ONU contra las desa­pariciones forzadas son dos poderosas herramientas que per­miten esclarecer los orígenes biológicos y luchar contra el robo de bebés y las desapariciones forzadas de niños. Estos delitos, de una gravedad manifiesta, requieren ser examinados desde sus vertientes jurídica, filosófica, política y bioética, porque, ante una situación tan compleja y que afecta a tantas personas, una so­ciedad responsable está obligada a tomar medidas. El presente libro, que analiza estas cuestiones tanto en el contexto europeo como en el latinoamericano, es obra de especialistas vinculados a las instituciones y los comités más representativos en la materia.

The book presents a qualitative and quantitative approach to understand, manage and enforce the integration of insulin into diabetes mellitus. Utilizing a sound theoretical and practical foundation and illustrating procedural techniques through scientific examples, the book bridges the gap between insulin and diabetes mellitus management. Detailed procedures have been omitted because of the variety of equipment and commercial kits used in today's clinical laboratories.

The book Cancer of the Uterine Endometrium - Advances and Controversies brings together an international collaboration of authors who share their contributions for the management of endometrial carcinoma. The scope of the text is not basic, but rather aims to provide a comprehensive and updated source of advances in the diagnosis and therapeutic strategies in this field of gynecologic cancer. Each section in the book attempts to provide the most relevant evidence-based information in the biology and genetics, modern imaging, surgery and staging, and therapies for endometrial cancer. It is hoped that future editions will bring additional authors to contribute to this endeavor. To this end, it is our patients who will benefit from this work.

This book is the first comprehensive study in German on tribal identity in the Middle East. It includes a comparative and theoretical survey of Muslim tribal societies and a detailed empirical case-study. A separate identity within wider political and cultural communities is one of the most characteristic aspects of Middle Eastern tribes. It is typically expressed in tribal striving for political autonomy - an autonomy practically realized in varying degrees according to historical conditions. The book examines cultural dimensions and practical manifestations of tribal identity in this tension between local particularism and wider belonging. A critical discussion of the anthropological notion of tribe serves as an introduction to the theoretical part of the book. The insight that the most important common traits of Muslim tribes are located in the cultural and ideological sphere leads on to an examination of the general characteristics of Middle Eastern tribal societies. Then specific cultural models of tribal identity, such as the ideological and practical role of kinship and marriage relations, are examined, and the highly variable practical manifestations of tribal organization are outlined. The first part of the book is concluded by a critical appraisal of competing theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of tribal identity, which forms the basis for the empirical case study. In the second part, the theoretical approach elaborated in the first part is applied to a case study of a specific tribal society, a central Moroccan Berber tribe. First, the historical and geographical conditions are analyzed. Then the history of the tribe and the various kinds of sources for its understanding are discussed. Further chapters are devoted to the traditional political and legal institutions and their transformations in the course of the 20th century. The hierarchically ordered local status categories and the segmentary structure of the tribe are analyzed in detail. Finally, an investigation of orally transmitted historical knowledge shows that the local discourse about the past is a privileged domain for the study of the ideologies and cultural conceptions that constitute local tribal identity but also contribute to limiting and transcending it. An important methodological principle followed throughout is that ruptures and contradictions should not be ignored or explained away. The oral historical discourse not only provides an insight into the meaning of tribal identity. It also shows how covertly the dominant ideological models are called into question time and again. Even on the cultural and ideological level, tribal identity can only be understood in its interrelations with the wider identity relating to the Muslim state - interrelations that must be explained as historically conditioned and variable.

Contrairement aux œuvres héritées de l’Antiquité grecque ou romaine, les écrits de la civilisation mésopotamienne sont tous issus de fouilles. L’assyriologue travaille à partir de tablettes d’argile inscrites en caractères cunéiformes. Il doit reconstituer les textes à partir de fragments, les mettre en ordre chronologique et géographique pour élaborer peu à peu une histoire non seulement politique, mais aussi sociale, économique et culturelle de la Mésopotamie. La tâche est immense et impliq...

This book offers a study into the perceptions of ancient and medieval Iran in the Byzantine Empire, as well as the effects of Persian culture upon Byzantine intellectualism, society, and culture. Byzantine Ideas of Persia, 650-1461 focuses on the place of ancient Persia in Byzantine cultural memory, both in the "religious" and the "secular" sense. By analysing a wide range of historical sources – from church literature to belles-lettres – this book provides an examination of the place of ancient Persia in Byzantine cultural memory, as well as the place and function of Persian motifs in the Byzantine mentality. Additionally, the author uses these sources to analyse thoroughly the knowledge Byzantines had about contemporary Iranian culture, the presence of ethnic Iranians and the circulation and usage of the Persian language in Byzantium. Finally, this book discusses the importance and influence of Iranian science on Byzantine scholars. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in Byzantine and Iranian History, particularly in reference to the cross-cultural and social influence of the two societies during the Middle Ages.

Although the financial sustainability of United Nations (UN) support to institutional capacity building in post-conflict contexts may be the least analysed topic on the peacebuilding agenda, understanding the costs of rebuilding and maintaining the security sector should be one of the most important priorities for security sector reform (SSR) practitioners today. Through innovative partnerships between the UN and the World Bank, a new and important practice area in public financial management of the security sector is beginning to take shape. This paper traces the new demands placed on peacekeeping operations to â get more bang for every peacekeeping buckâ , and explores how to match SSR priorities and recurring costs in the security sector with available resources over the long term. In presenting the lessons learned from the security sector public expenditure review conducted by the UN and the World Bank in Liberia in 2012, the first such review jointly undertaken by the two organizations, the paper seeks to illustrate how the discussion on right-sizing of the security sector can go hand in hand with a discussion on right-financing in order to help prioritize key reforms pragmatically in light of the available fiscal space. Specifically, the paper provides SSR practitioners with insights into the challenges often encountered when assisting national authorities to address the political economy of SSR, and how to navigate those dilemmas.

This study examines the relationship between sensory perception and exoticism in German, French, and British literature written between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its starting point is the proposition that exoticism can be described as a Western European discourse that lends actual or imagined elements of a foreign region, usually outside Europe, an unusual sensory dimension.

With a panoramic sweep across continents and topics, Early Modern Improvisations is an interdisciplinary collection that analyzes the relationship between early modern literature and history through lenses such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics. The book engages readers interested in texts that range from Shakespeare and Tudor queens to Anglican missionary work in North America; from contemporary feminist television series to Ancient Greek linguistic and philosophical concepts; from the delicate dance of diplomatic exchange to the instabilities of illness, food insecurity, and piracy. Its range of contributions encourages readers to discover their own intersections across literary and historical texts, a sense of discovery that this collection’s contributors learned from its dedicatee, John Watkins, a major literary and cultural historian whose work moves effortlessly across geographical, temporal, and political borders. His work and his personality embody the spirit of creative improvisation that brings new ideas together, allowing texts and figures of history to haunt later eras and encourage new questions. This volume is aimed at scholars and students alike who wish to explore early modern culture and its reverberations in ways that engage with a world outside the grand narratives and centralized institutions of power, a world that is more provisional, less scripted, and more improvisational. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC)] 4.0 license.

Wissensökonomie, entgrenzte Netzwerkgesellschaft - im globalen Zeitalter hat sich die räumliche Organisation wirtschaftlicher Prozesse radikal gewandelt. In diesem Buch blicken renommierte Wirtschaftsgeographen auf diese Veränderungen und entwerfen Alternativen zu dominierenden neoklassisch inspirierten Positionen. Im Dialog mit der Wissenschaftsphilosophie, den Kulturwissenschaften, der heterodoxen Ökonomik und der Organisationssoziologie werden zentrale Themen wie kulturelle Ökonomie, Netzwerke und Evolution verhandelt. Der Band wird damit zum Plädoyer für einen pluralistischen, transdisziplinären Zugang zu den vielfach gebrochenen Geographien einer globalisierten Ökonomie. Mit Beiträgen von Ash Amin, Trevor Barnes, Gernot Grabher und Ron Martin.

Whether a theoretical system is realistic or not has been a concern in economics, particularly in monetary theory, over the past century. Following John R. Hicks’ proposal that a realistic monetary theory could be constructed along an evolutionary path, starting with the workings of a real market, this volume considers whether we can look to the medieval economy as the point of departure. Drawing upon the work of Aristotle, scholastic economists, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras and many modern monetary theorists, this intriguing book provides a critical analysis of some basic theories of monetary analysis. Concentrating primarily on certain fundamental building blocks it covers: the theory and mathematical properties of barter and monetary relations the distinction between barter and monetary relations and money and non-money commodities the concept of exchange as an equation, and the notion of the exchange relation as a relation of equality. This groundbreaking study dispels some of the old myths and conjectures concerning money and exchange and opens up the way for the development of new approaches, both realistic and evolutionary, of interest to researchers and students of the history of monetary theory and economic thought.

Das Buch handelt von Lernen, Lehren, Lernfähigkeit, Unterricht, Lehrsätzen, Kompetenzen, Bildung, Altern und Ungewissheit — eingebettet in eine soziologische Medien- und Kommunikationstheorie, die die gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhänge all dieser Phänomene nachzuzeichnen erlaubt. Im Zentrum steht die These, der Lebenslauf lasse sich – wie Geld, Macht, Liebe und manches mehr – als ein symbolisch generalisiertes Medium der Kommunikation begreifen. Lernen und seine Komponenten kommen in den Blick, wenn man nach den Formen fragt, die sich im Medium des Lebenslaufs bilden und es reproduzieren.

This publication deals with A Biblical Theology of Life based on the New Testament. It forms the second of a two volume publication on A Biblical Theology of Life. These two volumes trace the concept of life throughout Protestant canon, working with the final form of the biblical books in Hebrew (vol. 5) and Greek (vol. 6) Scripture. This is done by providing the reader with a book-by-book overview of this concept. This book concludes with a final chapter synthesising the findings of the respective investigations of the Old and New Testament corpora in order to provide a summative theological perspective of the development of the concept through Scripture. It is clear that life forms a central and continuous theme throughout the Biblical text. The theme begins with the living God that creates life, but is shortly followed by death that threatens life. Despite this threat, God sustains life and awakens life from death. The text concludes with the consummation depicting eternal life in the new heaven and earth. The biblical theological approach that has been taken entails a thematic approach as it investigates the concept of life, with contextual foci on what individual books of Scripture teach about life, joined diachronically with an investigation of the progressive use of the concept of life in Scripture, while providing a theology of Scripture as a whole investigating the concept of life in all sixty-six books of the Protestant canon.

Proteins are macromolecules composed of amino acids that are essential for a large number of biological metabolic processes. Proteins are also used in technical applications, for example to catalyze reactions. The objective of this work is to provide an indication of filterability early in the process development. A filtration cell for a centrifuge developed in this work makes it possible to characterize filtration on a small scale.