Open Access Books

The article is a tribute to Riccardo Del Punta, highlighting his many intellectual and personal qualities. The author reflects on Del Punta’s wide-ranging curiosity and his ability to bridge theoretical and practical aspects of Labor law. Del Punta is praised for his courage in challenging mainstream views and for his deep engagement with concepts like justice, equality, and dignity, especially through the lens of Amartya Sen’s (and others’) “capabilities” theory. His approach to Labor law emphasized individual freedom and dignity, offering a modernized and pragmatic perspective on the field. Del Punta’s legacy is framed as both intellectually rich and socially relevant, influencing the evolution of Labor law in contemporary times​.

This Reprint presents a curated collection of twelve peer-reviewed articles, comprising nine original research papers and three reviews, that examine the diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic potential of circulating non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) across a wide range of human diseases. The contributions cover multiple disciplines, including oncology, neurology, psychiatry, immunology, and reproductive health, showcasing the versatility of ncRNAs—such as microRNAs, long non-coding RNAs, and circular RNAs—as biomarkers detectable in blood and other biofluids. This Reprint highlights recent progress in the discovery, validation, and mechanistic characterization of ncRNAs, emphasizing their value in disease stratification, the prediction of treatment response, and longitudinal monitoring. Within this Reprint, the potential of multi-analyte biopsy approaches is also highlighted, underscoring how ncRNAs can be combined with other circulating biomarkers, such as cell-free DNA, proteins, and extracellular vesicles, to advance precision medicine. Together, these contributions reflect the growing momentum of research regarding ncRNA and its translation into clinical applications. This Reprint provides a timely resource for researchers, clinicians, and industry professionals interested in leveraging non-coding RNAs to develop minimally invasive diagnostics and personalized therapeutic strategies.

Have you ever given thought to the fact that the water we use every day and for all sorts of uses could run out? Water is the most important element for all living beings. It is vitally important for human beings as well as for all flora and fauna that accompany us on planet Earth. How can we living beings who depend on it water survive without it? What actions are causing this resource to be ever scarcer? What should we be doing before this hydrological crisis? These are some of the questions that try to be answered.

Whose Mediterranean are we talking about? What languages are most appropriate to its reception and understanding? With two-thirds constituted by the histories and cultures of its African and Asian shorelines and hinterlands, and its principal spoken language – in all its variants and dialects – being Arabic, then the Mediterranean clearly exceeds the Western frame of explanation. Without pretending to speak for or in the name of these ignored and repressed dimensions, The Mediterranean Question explores the gap between the Mediterranean reduced to a European and Western mirror by listening and attending to some of those other histories, cultures, and lives. How to puncture prevalent European understandings of the Mediterranean? The colonizing impulse inscribed in Western historiography cannot be undone simply by adding previously repressed and unacknowledged histories. Instead, a re-examination of the premises and procedures that produced such exclusions leads to a valuable change in coordinates. An order of knowledge that creates subaltern objects of study to reconfirm European centrality and subjectivity is interrogated. Insisting on a politics of registration and listening, further critical incentives drawn from the trans-local dissemination of literature, music, cinema, and the visual arts can be deployed to query existing representations. In this more ragged and open series of maps, there lies no complete picture but rather a challenge to the violence of existing explanations. Insisting that present-day knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, The Mediterranean Question promotes a reconfiguration of historical archives and cultural ties, casting a critical light on the deeper histories that have made the Mediterranean, Europe, and Western modernity. Proposing a series of intersecting analyses that underline the colonial constitution of the present and its mobile and creolized formation, Chambers and Cariello seek to establish new coordinates for thinking and practicing the possibilities of another Mediterranean.

Soixante-dix ans après l’évènement fondateur du 18 juin 1940 et malgré plusieurs ouvrages marquants qui font suite à un cortège de mémoires d’acteurs de premier plan, la France Libre reste mal connue. Problèmes de définition, de chronologies, de méthodes, de sources ; concurrences entre les résistances, qu’il s’agisse des réseaux, des hommes, des mémoires ; multiplicités des trajectoires, des engagements mais aussi des ruptures et des désengagements sont des évidences trop longtemps passées sous silence. Tout ceci crée un écheveau complexe et souvent difficile à démêler. L’ambition de ce livre n’est donc pas de proposer un prêt à penser de la France Libre et encore moins une analyse définitive. Mais à partir de dossiers très neufs ou d’archives aussi inédites qu’exceptionnelles parfois, les auteurs rassemblés ici dessinent une histoire très renouvelée, toute en nuances et volontairement provisoire. Une attention toute particulière est cependant donnée aux entrées en résistance notamment sur le plan individuel ou administratif, mais aussi à certaines opérations ou certains milieux sans oublier les mécanismes mis en œuvre par l’occupant pour lutter contre ces combattants d’un nouveau genre.

L’approche par générations – c’est-à-dire par groupes d’individus nés au même moment et ayant par conséquent le même calendrier de vie – permet de distinguer les effets d’âge des effets de génération. Appliquée aux résultats des quatre vagues d’enquête sur les pratiques culturelles des Français (1973, 1981, 1988, 1997) cette approche confirme la nature générationnelle de la plupart des évolutions constatées depuis le début des années 1970 en montrant qu’elles ont été généralement initiées par une génération particulière, puis poursuivies et amplifiées par les suivantes. La montée en charge de l’audiovisuel par rapport à l’imprimé, par exemple, apparaît comme une mutation amorcée il y a trente ans par le recul de la lecture de la presse quotidienne, poursuivie par l’augmentation du temps passé devant le petit écran au moment de l’explosion du PAF et, un peu plus tard, par une relative désaffection pour la lecture de livre, puis enfin amplifiée ces dernières années par la généralisation des ordinateurs. L’analyse rétrospective confirme que la plupart des pratiques culturelles et médiatiques traditionnellement mesurées depuis le début des années 1970 semblent s’acheminer vers un déclin plus ou moins marqué au cours des prochaines années, à l’exception de l’écoute de la musique enregistrée. Cette tendance générale apparaît d’autant plus probable que ces dernières années ont été marquées par l’émergence d’une culture numérique que les jeunes générations ont massivement investie et dont on peut penser par conséquent qu’elle est amenée à se développer dans les années à venir du simple fait du renouvellement générationnel. Il est donc difficile, dans une perspective prospective, de ne pas penser que l’essor de cette culture numérique en devenir ne se fasse, au moins en partie, au détriment des pratiques culturelles et médiatiques antérieures, en raison de la concurrence qu’elle crée en termes de budget et de budgettemps, mais aussi en raison de la nature même de l’offre qu’elle propose, tant au plan des contenus culturels écrits, audio ou vidéo que des possibilités de diffusion pour les anciens médias (presse, radio, télevision).

This book sheds new light on the fascinating – at times dark and at times hopeful – reception of classical Yoga philosophies in Germany during the nineteenth century. When debates over God, religion, and morality were at a boiling point in Europe, Sanskrit translations of classical Indian thought became available for the first time. Almost overnight India became the centre of a major controversy concerning the origins of western religious and intellectual culture. Working forward from this controversy, this book examines how early translations of works such as the Bhagavad Gītā and the Yoga Sūtras were caught in the crossfire of another debate concerning the rise of pantheism, as a doctrine that identifies God and nature. It shows how these theological concerns shaped the image of Indian thought in the work of Schlegel, Gunderrode, Humboldt, Hegel, Schelling, and others, lasting into the nineteenth century and beyond. Furthermore, this book explores how worries about the perceived nihilism of Yoga were addressed by key voices in the early twentieth century Indian Renaissance – notably Dasgupta, Radhakrishnan, and Bhattacharyya – who defended sophisticated counterreadings of their intellectual heritage during the colonial era. Written for non-specialists, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany will be of interest to students and scholars working on nineteenth-century philosophy, Indian philosophy, comparative philosophy, Hindu studies, intellectual history, and religious history.

The object of study of this book is the Buenos Aires brothel which, during the period of tolerance that runs from 1875 to 1936, was dispersed, changed, and reconfigured several times. The purpose is to explain how and why that brothel, as one of the most emblematic spaces of the marginal universe of the city, paradoxically occupied a central place in the culture of those years. Urban growth, the development and widening of streets and squares, have practically erased all traces of the buildings and spaces that, in general, made up the brothel environment of Buenos Aires before reaching the first half of the 20th century. What remain are the stories, the chronicles. We have some sources that recover many voices, but almost never that of the prostituted woman. It is those stories that speak of the misery of a city and its society, of its power and of its night, that this book seeks to explore. It is something of that fragmented and diffuse universe that these pages attempt to reconstruct.

“Reader, where are you?”, wondered, in the mid-1880s, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, one of the Russian writers that paid the most attention to the readership of his time. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s call did not go unanswered. Over the past two centuries, various disciplines – from the social sciences to psychology, literary criticism, semiotics, historiography and bibliography – alternately tried to outline the specific features of the Russian reader and investigate his function in the history of Russian literary civilization. The essays collected in this volume follow in the tradition but, at the same time, present new challenges to the development of the discipline. The contributors, coming from various countries and different cultures (Russia, the US, Italy, France, Britain), discuss the subject of reading in Russia – from the age of Catherine II to the Soviet regime – from various perspectives: from aesthetics to reception, from the analysis of individual or collective practices, to the exploration of the social function of reading, to the spread and evolution of editorial formats. The contributions in this volume return a rich and articulated portrait of a culture made of great readers.

Mechanical properties of the plantar soft tissue, which acts as the interface between the skeleton and the ground, play an important role in distributing the force underneath the foot and in influencing the load transfer to the entire body during weight-bearing activities. Hence, understanding the mechanical behaviour of the plantar soft tissue and the mathematical equations that govern such behaviour can have important applications in investigating the effect of disease and injuries on soft tissue function. The plantar soft tissue of the foot shows a viscoelastic behaviour, where the reaction force is not only dependent on the amount of deformation but also influenced by the deformation rate. This chapter provides an insight into the mechanical behaviour of plantar soft tissue during loading with specific emphasis on heel pad, which is the first point of contact during normal gait. Furthermore, the methods of assessing the mechanical behaviour including the in vitro/in situ and in vivo are discussed, and examples of creep, stress relaxation, rate dependency and hysteresis behaviour of the heel pad are shown. In addition, the viscoelastic models that represent the mechanical behaviour of the plantar soft tissue under load along with the equations that govern this behaviour are elaborated and discussed.

Of the four months he spent at that base, he remembers the first weapon he got his hands on, a 1936 rifle used during the civil war. It was one of the most exciting things he experienced, so at first he decided to become a gunner. Then he was transferred to Astorga where, already as a professional soldier, he began to be assigned missions. He didn't like the place very much, but it was there that he started his first combat without direct fire. He was in several bases during the next three years, and was sent to secret missions in Kosovo and Lebanon, where he came to know what it was like to cross fires and risk his life for the conviction of defending a country he already felt as his own.

After overthrowing the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), proclaimed that he had obtained the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming), enabling establishment of a spiritual orientation and social agenda for China. Zhu, emperor during the Ming’s Hongwu reign period, launched a series of social programs to rebuild the empire and define Chinese cultural identity. To promote its reform programs, the Ming imperial court issued a series of legal documents, culminating in The Great Ming Code (Da Ming lu), which supported China’s legal system until the Ming was overthrown and also served as the basis of the legal code of the following dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911).This companion volume to Jiang Yonglin’s translation of The Great Ming Code (2005) analyzes the thought underlying the imperial legal code. Was the concept of the Mandate of Heaven merely a tool manipulated by the ruling elite to justify state power, or was it essential to their belief system and to the intellectual foundation of legal culture? What role did law play in the imperial effort to carry out the social reform programs?Jiang addresses these questions by examining the transformative role of the Code in educating the people about the Mandate of Heaven. The Code served as a cosmic instrument and moral textbook to ensure “all under Heaven” were aligned with the cosmic order. By promoting, regulating, and prohibiting categories of ritual behavior, the intent of the Code was to provide spiritual guidance to Chinese subjects, as well as to acquire political legitimacy. The Code also obligated officials to obey the supreme authority of the emperor, to observe filial behavior toward parents, to care for the welfare of the masses, and to maintain harmonious relationships with deities. This set of regulations made officials the representatives of the Son of Heaven in mediating between the spiritual and mundane worlds and in governing the human realm.This study challenges the conventional assumption that law in premodern China was used merely as an arm of the state to maintain social control and as a secular tool to exercise naked power. Based on a holistic approach, Jiang argues that the Ming ruling elite envisioned the cosmos as an integrated unit; they saw law, religion, and political power as intertwined, remarkably different from the “modern” compartmentalized worldview. In serving as a cosmic instrument to manifest the Mandate of Heaven, The Great Ming Code represented a powerful religious effort to educate the masses and transform society.

This book on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) extensively explores the core analyses and case studies within this field, incorporating the latest advancements. Each chapter delves into various disciplines like engineering, administration, economics, and technology, showcasing diverse applications and the utility of PCA. The book emphasizes the integration of PCA with other algorithms and methodologies, highlighting the enhancements achieved through combined approaches. Moreover, the book elucidates updated versions or iterations of PCA, detailing their descriptions and practical applications.

Leadership and Innovation During Crisis: Lessons from the Iraq War examines the role of leadership during wartime innovation efforts and finds that the senior military leader is essential for successful innovation, affecting both the likelihood of innovation and the form it takes. Through use cases and examples from the Iraq War, the author shows that innovation only occurs if leaders actively embrace innovation and employ the appropriate influence tactics to overcome the inherent individual and organizational resistance to change. Although this book only examines wartime innovation in the military, the findings also apply broadly to peacetime and non-military innovation efforts.