Open Access Books

Il n’est pas une, mais des manières de fonder, de vivre et de défaire le lien familial. Construite autour d’un enfant ou d’un couple, marié ou non, hétéro ou homosexuel, la famille, hiérarchisée ou égalitaire, parfois polygame, monoparentale, nucléaire ou élargie, unie ou désunie, séparée, regroupée, recomposée…se décline au pluriel. Ce pluralisme familial, qui découle des conceptions idéologiques, politiques, religieuses, culturelles, parfois même économiques de chacun est plus que jamais vi...

There are many industrial and medical applications of CO2 (λ=10.6 μm) and Nd:YAG (λ=1.06 μm) infrared lasers for which the quality of the process are tightly connected to the characteristic of the laser pulse. These two types of lasers deliver pulses with duration, repetition frequency and power that can be controlled by means of a programmable electronic control unit. An open-loop control generally optimize the process performances by availing of a laser system model. However, this method cannot control that during the operation the laser source and the optical delivering system could deteriorate; moreover the laser beam characteristics and laser pulse temporal envelope could change by several factors like power supply variations, optical beam misalignments, dirty deposits on mirrors, changes in laser efficiency and many others .

Wie kann der Öffentlichkeit ein digitaler Zugang zu Sammlungen visuellen Kulturerbes ermöglicht werden? Diese Frage beschäftigt viele Museen, Archive und Bibliotheken, allerdings fehlen entsprechende Erhebungen, die bei der Umsetzung helfen könnten. Im Auftrag der Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte (SKKG) in Winterthur widmet sich Sonja Gasser dieser Leerstelle und analysiert in einer Umfrage die Anforderungen zur digitalen Repräsentation von Sammlungen. Die Ergebnisse bieten Museen und anderen Kulturinstitutionen Orientierung und Inspiration - beispielsweise bei der Entwicklung oder Erweiterung eines digitalen Angebots und der Abstimmung digitaler Sammlungen auf die Bedürfnisse der Nutzenden.

Die Validität bei der Bewertung sprachlicher Kompetenzen im Fach Deutsch als Fremdsprache steht in der vorliegenden Studie im Mittelunkt. Untersucht wird auf welche sprachlichen, textuellen und aufgabenbezogenen Aspekte die Bewertenden Wert legen, die Bewerterübereinstimmung schwedischer Bewertenden sowie wie sich schwedische Bewertungen schriftlicher Kompetenz zu den Niveaus des GER verhalten. Neben einer qualitativen thematischen Inhaltsanalyse bietet die Arbeit auch quantitativ angelegte statistische Berechnungen. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen werden didaktische Empfehlungen für den schulischen Fremdsprachenunterricht in Schweden gegeben. Dieses Buch wendet sich an Forschende und Praktiker im fremdsprachlichen Bereich, an Lernende, Lehrkräfte, Lehrwerksautoren und -autorinnen, Lehramtstudierende sowie weitere Akteure schulischer Bildung.

Chitin and chitosan are abundant marine-derived biopolymers with unique properties, including biocompatibility, biodegradability, and low cost. Furthermore, their functional groups easily enable versatile modifications for biomedical and tissue engineering applications. Processing strategies allow tuning of their characteristics, including their degree of deacetylation, molecular weight, viscosity, and mineral and protein content, making them highly adaptable compared to synthetic polymers. These sustainable materials have demonstrated significant potential in therapeutic biomaterials, including anti-infective coatings, tissue engineering scaffolds, drug delivery systems, gene therapy vectors, and implant applications. Through this reprint, we aim to showcase advances that expand the role of these natural polymers in next-generation healthcare solutions.

What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict shows how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. Focusing on how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death. “Timothy Benedict has produced a work brimming with wisdom drawn from his work as a chaplain as well as a broad understanding of the place of religion in the lives of contemporary Japanese people.” — HELEN HARDACRE, Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society, Harvard University “Benedict offers a highly original perspective and new insightful material, providing a critical approach to the debate about spiritual care and spirituality.” — ERICA BAFFELLI, Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Manchester “Spiritual Ends reveals an unassuming approach to spiritual care that privileges human connections at life’s end.” — JACQUELINE STONE, author of Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan “A discerning study of pain and comfort at the end of life, and a story of the invention of spirituality in Japan, which traffics between medical, psychological, and religious thought.” — AMY B. BOROVOY, Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

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Originally published in 1906 within the Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society, this volume contains the names, gravesite locations, and available personal details for 1,201 people interred at the two original Moravian graveyards in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, between 1744 and 1904. A map of the primary graveyard and a comprehensive name index add to the volume’s accessibility as a guide for visits and research. This volume also includes a note on Moravian burial practices and a brief history of the graveyards in Nazareth.

The construction industry makes a significant contribution to the global economy. Effective management of construction projects is essential to ensuring timely completion that meets quality standards within a project’s prescribed scope and budget. Furthermore, assuring sustainability is crucial to reducing the impact of construction on the environment. The construction industry is also affected by globalization and increasing susceptibility to disasters highlighting the need for health and safety and resilience in the industry, especially after global pandemics and natural disasters. Digitalization and industrialization pave the way to the solution or mitigation of numerous issues in the construction industry by transforming business operations, improving productivity and safety, ensuring quality and compliance to standards, increasing sustainability, among other measures. It is imperative for project managers and other construction stakeholders to be digitally oriented. This reprint comprises of a collection of cutting-edge research articles in construction and project management that explores advances in digital, sustainable, and industrialized construction solutions for prevalent issues in construction and project management and investigates the needs of health and safety and resilience in the construction industry.

Forensic medicine is a scientific discipline characterized by continuous evolution due not only to progress in medical knowledge but also to changing juridical and social requirements. This book analyzes the state of the art and the most interesting lines of research in forensic medicine, laying the foundations to explore new perspectives in multiple disciplinary sectors. This book collects several themes to create a practical tool of knowledge for experts in the discipline as well as young and emerging researchers.

This book investigates how mourning is transformed in the digital age, where grief is mediated by algorithms, circulated through hashtags, and shaped by the economies of social media platforms. This timely edited collection explores the rise of digital mourning practices, from TikTok memorials and grief influencers to the politicisation of loss in activist movements. Through a platform- centric lens, the book examines how contemporary grief unfolds publicly, performatively, and often unequally in online spaces. This collection brings together interdisciplinary scholarship, using methods including digital ethnography, visual analysis, and platform critique to reveal the architectures that govern digital mourning. It shows how platform logics determine whose grief is amplified and whose is erased, how moderation policies impact the persistence of loss online, and how mourning is entangled with attention economies, digital labour, and resistance. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of how digital spaces both enable and constrain emotional expression, community care, and practices of remembrance during times of grief. This book will be essential reading for scholars across media and communication studies, death studies, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. It offers conceptual and methodological tools to engage critically with grief’s digital turn, addressing questions of visibility, performance, politics, and platform governance. As mourning becomes increasingly public, networked, and algorithmically structured, this book provides a necessary account of how grief is being reshaped in a rapidly changing media landscape.

In 1998, the Getty Center hosted the "Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity" conference, gathering the founders and thinkers of two San Francisco non-profit organizations interested in long-term thinking and archiving: the Internet Archive and the Long Now Foundation. This chapter proposes to discuss two different ways of archiving through time, in digital and analog formats, for virtual web contents and physical paper-based ones. It explores various types of archiving methods and tools and the management challenges they raise, in terms of time and space, but also innovation, maintenance, and "continuity". It depicts two distinct visions of the future of archiving which nonetheless converge in their mission of safeguarding, sharing, and giving access to information and knowledge for the decades and centuries to come.

This open access textbook provides a concise introduction to economic approaches and mathematical methods for the study of water allocation and distribution problems. Written in an accessible and straightforward style, it discusses and analyzes central issues in integrated water resource management, water tariffs, water markets, and transboundary water management. By illustrating the interplay between the hydrological cycle and the rules and institutions that govern today’s water allocation policies, the authors develop a modern perspective on water management. Moreover, the book presents an in-depth assessment of the political and ethical dimensions of water management and its institutional embeddedness, by discussing distribution issues and issues of the enforceability of human rights in managing water resources. Given its scope, the book will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and engineering, as well as practitioners in the water sector, seeking a deeper understanding of economic approaches to the study of water management.

Academic thought circulates on a time-space continuum: authors, ideas and methods are discovered, discussed, discarded, praised, rewritten, refracted, transformed, transposed and translated. The contributors of this anthology develop cross-disciplinary approaches to study and understand translation of academic thought. They critically engage with the relationship of translation and meaning formation, context and style, as well as with the social and discursive positioning of translators in academic fields and beyond. Furthermore, the agents negotiating intellectual exchange are placed in specific political and historical contexts as well as respective scholarly frameworks of economics, philosophy, sociology and related fields.

Following Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs, the first explorers of the new worlds are innocents: they respond to the mythic imagery of the first man. It is on their successors that lays the blame: interested in material enrichment, they despoil the new world. After Magellan, the first geographical demarcation line having been overcome, the culture degeneration of Western world is double: geographic and hermeneutic. Voltaire is in fact not so far from Rousseau’s thinking.