Open Access Books

The Politics of Justification is an investigation of welfare retrenchment in Denmark and the Netherlands, 1982-1998. Welfare retrenchment is politically highly controversial, but still governments do retrench. This book argues that governments can implement retrenchment if they can achieve a party political consensus allowing them to frame retrenchment in a way that makes it seems justified to the electorate. In the Netherlands, such a consensus emerged in the mid 1980s due to the power of the CDA. It has allowed Dutch government to implement a number of welfare retrenchments. In Denmark, a consensus did not emerge until the Social Democratic Party re-entered government in 1993 explaining why the Danish welfare state has seen less retrenchment than the Dutch one. With its focus on the strategies of the political parties, the book differs from many other studies of the subject focusing on the role of political institutions.

This thesis addresses the topic of highly integrated vector network analysis. Due to its significant contribution to technological advances in the past and its presently high potential regarding instrumentation and biomedical sensing applications, the technique of network analysis plays a key role in microwave and wireless engineering. However, the application of network analyzers is frequently limited due to the size, weight and cost of the instruments. For this reason, the potential and feasibility of the VNA-on-chip is evaluated. Therefore, theoretical and practical studies were performed by means of narrow-band microwave reflectometers with different degrees of integration. After a successful proof of concept, a chipset dedicated to a highly integrated 4-32 GHz 2-port vector network analyzer is developed in silicon germanium (SiGe) technology. The chipset can be utilized for the implementation of a heterodyne network analyzer and features a stimulus signal generator with integrated switch and a four-channel receiver chip. In a further step, a fully integrated RF frontend is demonstrated, including on-chip directive elements. In combination with a modular hardware demonstrator, the assembly serves as a miniaturized 2-port vector network analyzer from 4 GHz to 32 GHz. The measured 2 x 2 S-matrices show an excellent agreement with the results obtained by commercial measurement equipment. The measurements are highly repeatable and the drift over time is negligible. Furthermore, highly integrated network analyzers were applied to biomedical scenarios. For this purpose, a reflection based analyzer with external probe as well as a transmission based one with an on-chip sensor are presented and compared to an alternative sensing system.

Bausteine einer Korpusgrammatik des Deutschen (“Building blocks towards a corpus grammar of German”) is a series presenting corpus linguistic studies on German grammar conducted at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim (IDS). Using state-of-the-art corpus linguistic methodology, the series aims to capture the diversity and variability of German grammar at a high resolution. At the same time, it aims to ensure the study results are verifiable. Issue by issue, the series will add “building blocks” for a new, consistently corpus-based grammar of German. In addition to the peer-reviewed texts, which are written in the style of grammar chapters, the series publishes the results of statistical analyses and, for selected topics, the underlying data sets.

The sixth part of this volume includes contributions that cover the years of our country's history ranging from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. In this period of time the first transition from the agricultural to the industrial economy occurred, which ended with the end of the Second World War and the promulgation of the Constitution of the "democratic republic founded on work". Therefore, the work of industrial society is definitively affirmed and developed, in which the idea of "necessary" work of the Constitution is confirmed and, starting from 1970, the idea contained in the Workers' Statute. Finally, starting from the 1980s, the period begins that sees the end of Fordism, when the ideas of work of industrial society enter into crisis under the pressure of globalization, the knowledge economy and the information technology, digital (AI) revolution, without arriving at a new idea of work and its relationship with life.

This open access book assesses the potential of data-driven methods in industrial process monitoring engineering. The process modeling, fault detection, classification, isolation, and reasoning are studied in detail. These methods can be used to improve the safety and reliability of industrial processes. Fault diagnosis, including fault detection and reasoning, has attracted engineers and scientists from various fields such as control, machinery, mathematics, and automation engineering. Combining the diagnosis algorithms and application cases, this book establishes a basic framework for this topic and implements various statistical analysis methods for process monitoring. This book is intended for senior undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in fault diagnosis technology, researchers investigating automation and industrial security, professional practitioners and engineers working on engineering modeling and data processing applications. This is an open access book.

El presente volumen es fruto del trabajo de catorce lingüistas de la Universidad de Granada y supone una contribución fundamental al estudio sociolingüístico del español hablado en esta ciudad andaluza. Los trabajos, distribuidos en cuatro apartados (Fonética, Gramática, Léxico y Pragmática), están elaborados, bien sobre materiales orales de una muestra de hablantes representativa de la ciudad de Granada, recogidos de acuerdo con la metodología del proyecto PRESEEA, bien sobre muestras orales de inmigrantes residentes en Granada. El objetivo es doble: por un lado, ofrecer un panorama global de la distribución sociolingüística de diversos fenómenos en esta variedad urbana y, por otro lado, estudiar los procesos de acomodación a la norma urbana de inmigrados de otras comunidades de habla.

Several of the most known and discussed concepts of the digital age predated the digitalization itself and have been previously used in the “analogue times”. Other concepts were coined for the digital society but have transformed and are continuously transforming over time. This edited book selects some of these concepts and starts a time travel through their history, heritage, reinvention, and reinvestment in media and communication studies.

An extraordinary court with late medieval roots in the activities of the king’s council, Star Chamber came into its own over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before being abolished in 1641 by members of parliament for what they deemed egregious abuses of royal power. Before its demise, the court heard a wide range of disputes in cases framed as fraud, libel, riot, and more. In so doing, it produced records of a sort that make its archive invaluable to many researchers today for insights into both the ordinary and extraordinary. The chapters gathered here explore what we can learn about the history of an age through both the practices of its courts and the disputes of the people who came before them. With Star Chamber, we view a court that came of age in an era of social, legal, religious, and political transformation, and one that left an exceptional wealth of documentation that will repay further study.

This open access book introduces readers to the craft of writing iconographic research poetry in a way that is scholarly, yet playful. By tracing the historical foundations of concrete and iconographic poetry, as well as the development of research poetry and poetic inquiry, the book examines the intellectual roots that inform this unique methodological approach. The book offers a detailed description of the methods that can be used to design iconographic research poetry. It includes step-by-step description of strategies that researchers can use to create iconographic research poetry from qualitative data. By explicating the processes by which data can be represented in the form of iconographic research poetry and offering exemplars, readers will find specific hands-on strategies for creating their own iconographic research poems. The book contains writing exercises designed to help aspiring iconographic research poets exercise their poetic imagination. It also provides qualitative research instructors with suggestions for integrating iconographic research poetry into the classroom.

This open access book takes a critical and international perspective to the mainstreaming of the Global Citizenship Concept and analyses the key issues regarding global citizenship education across the world. In that respect, it addresses a pressing need to provide further conceptual input and to open global citizenship agendas to diversity and indigeneity. Social and political changes brought by globalisation, migration and technological advances of the 21st century have generated a rise in the popularity of the utopian and philosophical idea of global citizenship. In response to the challenges of today’s globalised and interconnected world, such as inequality, human rights violations and poverty, global citizenship education has been invoked as a means of preparing youth for an inclusive and sustainable world. In recent years, the development of global citizenship education and the building of students’ global citizenship competencies have become a focal point in global agendas for education, international educational assessments and international organisations. However, the concept of global citizenship education still remains highly contested and subject to multiple interpretations, and its operationalisation in national educational policies proves to be challenging. This volume aims to contribute to the debate, question the relevancy of global citizenship education’s policy objectives and to enhance understanding of local perspectives, ideologies, conceptions and issues related to citizenship education on a local, national and global level. To this end, the book provides a comprehensive and geographically based overview of the challenges citizenship education faces in a rapidly changing global world through the lens of diversity and inclusiveness. ;

This collection brings together leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers to discuss the sciences and mathematics used in various Eastern, Western, and Indigenous societies, both ancient and contemporary. The authors analyze prevailing assumptions about these societies and propose more faithful, sensitive analyses of their ontological views about reality—a step toward mutual understanding and translatability across cultures and research fields. Science in the Forest, Science in the Past is a pioneering interdisciplinary exploration that will challenge the way readers interested in sciences, mathematics, humanities, social research, computer sciences, and education think about deeply held notions of what constitutes reality, how it is apprehended, and how to investigate it.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Jeffrey C. Alexander examines what was new about Egypt's Spring revolution. Why was it so compelling to watch, and what made it so effective and does it have implications for democratic movements internationally. Using international news reports and translations of the social media pages that brought Egyptians flocking onto Tahrir Square, Alexander uncovers the narrative of a revolution that was scripted by its organizers, as both a moral statement and a media and digital statement. He sees it as a theatrical performance, designed to reveal to the key protagonists what a civil, egalitarian society might look like, by showing it in microcosm on the Square. Ultimately, he argues, it was the sight of the protestor's behaviour that swayed the army, and brought about regime change. From the author of the widely acclaimed 2010 book: The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power, this powerful intervention into the debate on the Arab Spring is a must-read for those curious about how social media are fundamentally changing global politics.

By portraying the circumstances of people living with chronic conditions in radically different contexts, from Alzheimer’s patients in the UK to homeless people with psychiatric disorders in India, Managing Chronicity in Unequal States offers glimpses of what dealing with medically complex conditions in stratified societies means. While in some places the state regulates and intrudes on the most intimate aspects of chronic living, in others it is utterly and criminally absent. Either way, it is a present/absent actor that deeply conditions people’s opportunities and strategies of care. This book explores how individuals, groups and communities navigate uncertain and unequal healthcare systems, in which inherent moral judgements on human worth have long-lasting effects on people’s wellbeing. This is key reading for anyone wishing to deconstruct the issues at stake when analysing how care and chronicity are entangled with multiple institutional, economic, and other circumstantial factors. How people access the available informal and formal resources as well as how they react to official diagnoses and decisions are important facets of the management of chronicity. In the arena of care, people with chronic conditions find themselves negotiating restrictions and handling issues of power and (inter)dependency in relationships of inequality and proximity. This is particularly relevant in current times, when care has given in to the lure of the market, and the possibility of living a long and fulfilling life has been drastically reduced, transformed into a ‘reward’ for the few who have been deemed worthy of it.

Synesius' essay De insomniis ('On Dreams') inquires into the meaning and importance of dreams for human beings and treats themes - most of all the relationship of humans to higher spheres -, which for religiously- and philosophically-minded people are still important today.

"Part art history essay, part experimental fiction, part theoretical manifesto on the politics of equivalence, Helicography examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson’s iconic 1970 artwork Spiral Jetty. In an essay and film made to accompany the earthwork, Smithson invites us to imagine the stone helix of his structure at various orders of magnitude, from microscopic molecules to entire galaxies. Taking up this invitation with an unrelenting and literal enthusiasm, Helicography pursues the implications of such transformations all the way to the limits of logic. If other spirals, from the natural to the man-made, were expanded or condensed to the size of Spiral Jetty, what are the consequences of their physical metamorphoses? What other equivalences follow in turn, and where do their surprising historical, cultural, and mechanical connections lead? This book considers a number of forms in order to find out: the fluid vortices of whirlpools, hurricanes, and galaxies; the delicate shells of snails and the threatening pose of rattlesnakes; prehistoric ferns and the turns of the inner ear; the monstrous jaws of ancient sharks; a baroque finial scroll on a bass viol; a 19th-century watch spring; phonograph discs and spooled film; the largest open-pit mine on the planet. The result is a narrative laboratory for the “science of imaginary solutions” proposed by Alfred Jarry (whose King Ubu also plays a central role in the story told here), a work of fictocriticism blurring form and content, and the story of a single instant in time lost in the deserts of the intermountain west."