Open Access Books

This reprint presents advances in operation and maintenance in solar plants, wind farms and microgrids. This compendium of scientific articles will help clarify the current advances in this subject, so it is expected that it will please the reader.

La décision est devenue aujourd’hui un enjeu majeur : les décisions, individuelles ou collectives, ont des effets parfois énormes, le monde s’est étendu et complexifié, les participants et les instances sont toujours plus nombreux, les informations toujours plus abondantes et, grâce à la science, plus fiables, l’informatique fournit de puissants outils. Nous ne sommes pourtant pas sûrs de savoir ce qu’est une bonne décision ni comment y parvenir. Cet ouvrage examine la décision sous l’angle théorique et sous la forme qu’elle prend dans le contexte des sciences et du droit. Il constitue une contribution originale mais accessible à la théorie de la décision et à la philosophie des sciences.

Timothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class of discourse is replaced by another. He seeks to demonstrate that each new mode does not constitute a radical break from the past but in fact develops directly from its predecessor.

Textiles accompany us throughout our lives, au fil du temps , from the cradle to the grave. Aspects of time, seasons and chronology play an important role when exploring textiles and clothes in antiquity. The time of textiles appears highly gendered, embodied, tangible, and concrete. Textiles follow their own timeframes and paces, and they connect us to the past in an intimate and diachronic way because we still wear woven fabrics, as people did in antiquity. Textiles themselves are ephemeral and rarely survive in archaeological contexts. But when they do, they can show evidence of a long life. This book is about the time of textiles in ancient Greece: how time was articulated and conceived via clothing and textile production and how clothes conveyed time, seasons, ages, lifetimes and chronological periods. Textiles moreover symbolized eternity and destiny, as the spinning goddesses of fate called Moirai by the ancient Greeks. These goddesses spin, measure and cut the thread of a person's life. The book invites university students in history, archaeology and classics, as well as interested readers, craft communities and Humanities scholars to reflect on diverse dimensions of time in ancient Greece through the study of textiles and clothes.

The grand building complex in Tarraco known as the “Provincial Forum” is one of the most emblematic imperial-era monuments in the western Roman provinces. Based on the observation and detailed analysis of the archaeological evidence from an original perspective, this monograph proposes an investigation of the technical aspects and Roman building processes involved in the three main areas of the monument: the Worship Area, the Representation Square and the Circus. The construction of one of the key monuments in the Roman West was extensively influenced by local stone resources, in particular limestone, coming from the quarries near the colony. The use of this stone material have generated the search for architectural solutions, combination of material and technique, that have become the identifying characteristic not only of the monument, but also of the town’s image. The analysis of the construction process was key to understanding the ancient structures. It revealed the dynamic nature of their construction, the result of a plan that was constantly changing and adapting to external conditions or to the requirements of the construction site. It shows a process that reflects the existence of a plan in continuous evolution, a manifestation of the essence of the building site (cantiere di costruzione) and its architecture.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History presents a cutting-edge overview of the dynamic and ever-expanding field of environmental history. It addresses recent transformations in the field and responses to shifting scholarly, political, and environmental landscapes. The handbook fully and critically engages with recent exciting changes, contextualizes them within longer-term shifts in the field, and charts potential new directions for study. It focuses on five key areas: Theories and concepts related to changing considerations of social justice, including postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist approaches, and the field’s growing emphasis on multiple human voices and agencies. The roles of non-humans and the more-than-human in the telling of environmental histories, from animals and plants to insects as vectors of disease and the influences of water and ice, the changing theoretical approaches and the influence of concepts in related areas such as animal and discard studies. How changes in theories and concepts are shaping methods in environmental history and shifting approaches to traditional sources like archives and oral histories as well as experiments by practitioners with new methods and sources. Responses to a range of current complex problems, such as climate change, and how environmental historians can best help mitigate and resolve these problems. Diverse ways in which environmental historians disseminate their research within and beyond academia, including new modes of research dissemination, teaching, and engagements with stakeholders and the policy arena. This is an important resource for environmental historians, researchers and students in the related fields of political ecology, environmental studies, natural resources management and environmental planning. Chapters 9, 10 and 26 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Drawing on the authors' more than six years of R&D in location-based information systems (LBIS) as well as their participation in defining the Java ME Location API 2.0, Location-Based Information Systems: Developing Real-Time Tracking Applications provides information and examples for creating real-time LBIS based on GPS-enabled cellular phones

Governments, organizations, and schools around the world are committed to providing a safe and friendly learning environment for students. However, bullying, truancy, violence, discrimination, and addiction are still common in schools around the world due to students' maladaptive and deviant behaviors. While educators have focused on such issues over the past few decades, with the boom in internet use, the impact of adverse events in schools has expanded from offline to online, and this has become a globally important public health issue. In addition, adverse events continue to occur, even as educators work to intervene and prevent these events. Due to these issues, it is necessary to continue to explore the causes and effects of these maladaptive and deviant behaviors and the effectiveness of interventions over time. These findings will help governments, organizations, educators, and communities worldwide to address and prevent the occurrence of maladaptive and deviant behaviors in schools. Therefore, our journal presents a Special Issue on this topic. In this Special Issue, 18 articles have been included, covering editorials, research papers, systematic literature reviews, commentary articles, and more. We believe that this Special Issue reprint will contribute to understanding the reasons behind and counseling strategies for improving maladaptive and deviant behaviors in schools.

This book endeavours to outline case studies that promote sustainable Local Economic Development (LED) initiatives. It is generally believed that local governments are the foot soldiers of LED. However, this seems to be a myth, as local governments in South Africa and elsewhere have not yet fulfilled this mandate and have been struggling for several years to implement LED initiatives. The distinctive merit of this book lies in the way it combines the South African context with the wider international development context in ways that there is a flow of information and ideas both ways. The book is an essential part of this sequence of ideas development and action at a critical time for strategic action directed at a sustainable future. It showcases case studies and responses to the impacts of globalisation as a bridge between urban/rural and institutional action and reveals avenues for local government leadership in communities, research, student engagement and wider interactions.

Global economic losses due to severe weather events have grown dramatically over the past two decades. A large proportion of these losses are due to severe wind storms such as tropical cyclones and tornadoes, which can cause destruction to buildings, houses, and other infrastructure over large areas. To address the growing losses, many new large-scale and full-scale laboratories have been developed. These tools are used to examine the issues that could not be solved with the traditional tools of wind engineering including model-scale boundary layer wind tunnels, simplified standardized product tests, and other methods of analysis. This book presents state-of-the-art results from the development of the many novel approaches being used to mitigate natural disasters around the world.

The book contains a collection of articles dealing with how the extraction of mineral resources can be considered in environmental analyses such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The consumption of resources, e.g., metals, is increasing strongly worldwide. This is associated with more energy use; environmental pollution; and social, economic, and political consequences. An increase is also expected for the coming decades. At the same time, modern products and technologies, even in the field of renewable energies, require a large number of critical raw materials. A crucial question here is the exhaustibility of natural resources. What is the relevance of resource depletion today? Must a geological shortage of metals be expected in the foreseeable future? How could such a thing be considered in the LCA of products and weighed against other environmental aspects? The articles in question have been written over the past three years by leading experts in both geology and environmental sciences and show the breadth of the controversial discussion.

El presente libro es resultado de una iniciativa conjunta entre la Confederación Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Trabajadores Estatales (CLATE) y el Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), que tuvo su origen en ocasión del año del cincuentenario de ambas organizaciones. En relación a las investigaciones que aquí se publican, creemos que hemos respondido a la necesidad de articular la acción sindical con la investigación social. Para los trabajadores existe una doble demanda al respecto. En primer lugar, la de contar con información de primera mano, que pueda servir de insumo a la acción sindical. En segundo lugar, la de poder relevar y conocer en profundidad distintos aspectos vinculados al mundo del trabajo a través de estudios de alcance regional, que permitan un análisis comparado entre nuestros países. Y esto es así tanto por el carácter regional de nuestra Confederación como por el hecho de que los embates del capital sobre el trabajo se producen a nivel regional y global, lo que exige respuestas por parte de los trabajadores en el mismo sentido.

In the context of the food industry, "Innovative Food Products and Processing" refers to the creation and application of cutting-edge techniques, technologies, and approaches. This vibrant industry covers a broad range of topics, with the aim of enhancing food quality, safety, sustainability, and the consumer experience. This Special Issue, entitled “Innovative Food Products and Processing” provides readers with a wide range of topics and applications in food science and technology, such as the use of food chemistry, biochemistry, fermentation, and microbiology, as well as new contemporary processing and preservation technologies and techniques for effective waste management and green technology for the food processing industry. “Innovative Food Products and Processing” is an excellent resource for food science researchers, food scientists, biochemists, nutritionists, and students. This publication's wide range of topics provides a complete overview of the most recent breakthroughs, cutting-edge technologies, and emerging trends in the food industry.

This publication concerns the history of the Tuscan Capuchin convents since their foundation in the 18th century, analysed through the transcription and critical edition of a manuscript written in 1704 by Filippo Bernardi da Firenze (1649-1721). It is a source of great interest both for considering the events happening in the convents, and more generally for the history of Tuscany itself. In fact, the manuscript collects numerous transcribed documents - dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century - whose originals are now partially lost. Through these testimonies it is possible to retrace the events of the Tuscan communities and obtain numerous information of a social, anthropological and cultural nature. The manuscript is preceded by a historical introduction to the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and by the biography of Filippo da Firenze.

Funeral culture is changing rapidly. In recent years, graveyards and burial rituals in Germany have altered significantly. They no longer reflect mechanisms of collective sense-making; instead, they represent individual lifeworlds. Death and the decisions and actions surrounding it have, in effect, become characterised by pluralism.When it comes to legal regulations, however, no change is visible. The law does not interpret the aforementioned cultural transformation from the perspective of the bereaved. It is thus not surprising that graveyard rules and especially the stipulation that human remains may only be interred in a cemetery have come under criticism.Yet today, practices have evolved by which the bereaved can sidestep the rules and keep the ashes of their deceased relatives with them, or scatter them at alternative locations. The trigger for this silent revolution is individualisation. However much individual decisions play a role in this respect, this development is also the result of changes within the cultural mind. They both mark a shift towards mourning becoming more autonomous.