Open Access Books

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) has developed from primarily a method of academic study into a recognized technology that has advanced measurement capabilities within many different industrial sectors. These sectors include areas such as national security, energy, forensics, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, etc. Despite this diversity, these applications have many shared technical challenges and regulatory burdens, yet interdisciplinary cross-talk is often limited. To facilitate the sharing of knowledge, this Special Issue presents technical articles from four different areas, including the oil industry, nanostructured systems and materials, metabolomics, and biologics. These areas use NMR or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies that range from low-field relaxometry to magnetic fields as high as 700 MHz. Each article represents a practical application of NMR. A few articles are focused on basic research concepts, which will likely have the cross-cutting effect of advancing multiple disciplinary areas.

This book is the first to comprehensively develop the concept of childism to understand, study, and analyze age-based discrimination against children. It presents a critical theory to help comprehend intersecting prejudice against children and to examine the weak implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and in what ways violations against children can be analyzed through the intersections of racist, sexist, and ableist discrimination. The book further offers scholars a new perspective when studying structural forms of discrimination and oppression against children and provides professionals with a new vocabulary on prejudice targeting children when assessing theory, policy, and praxis on ‘child-friendly’ and ‘child-centered’ initiatives that overlook the need to protect children against discrimination. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of human rights, child and youth studies, education, prejudice studies, the United Nations and child law, and more broadly to sociology, social policy, psychology, and social work.

The Routledge Handbook of Taxation and Philanthropy ventures into a territory that is still widely unexplored. It contains 30 academic contributions that aim to provide a better understanding of whether, why, and how philanthropic initiatives, understood as voluntary contributions for the common good, can and should be fostered by states through tax incentives. The topic has been addressed from a multidisciplinary and multicultural perspective – covering neuroeconomics, sociology, political science, psychology, affective sciences, philosophy, behavioral economy, and law – because of its global and multifaceted nature. It also contains the OECD report on Taxation and Philanthropy released in November 2020, which was prepared in this context as a result of a collaboration with the Geneva Centre for Philanthropy of the University of Geneva. The book is divided into four sections, exploring, respectively, the justification of tax incentives for philanthropy, theoretical and empirical insights about taxes, efficiency and donor behavior in that context, and tax incentives for cross-border philanthropy and for hybrid entities and social entrepreneurship. It is believed that this volume will be a landmark yet only the beginning of a journey in which a lot remains to be studied, learned, and said.

When he started taking paying passengers by boat through the rapids of the Colorado River's canyons, Norman Nevills invented whitewater tourism and the commercial river business. For twelve years, from 1938 until his death in a plane crash in 1949, he safely took, without a single life lost, friends, explorers, and customers down the Colorado, Green, San Juan, Salmon, and Snake Rivers in boats he designed. National media found him and his adventures irresistible and turned him into the personification of river running. Logging seven trips through the Grand Canyon when no one else had completed more than two, he was called the Fast Water Man. Boatmen he trained went on to found their own competing operations. Always controversial, Nevills had important critics and enemies as well as friends and supporters, but no one can dispute his tremendous impact on the history of western rivers and recreation. Nevills's complete extant journals of those river expeditions are published for the first time in High, Wide, and Handsome. They contain vivid stories and images of still untamed-by-dams rivers and canyons in the Colorado River system and elsewhere, of wild rides in wooden boats, and of the few intrepid pioneers of adventure tourism who paid Nevills so they could experience it all. They have been transcribed and edited by river historian Roy Webb, author of If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runners and Call of the Colorado.

Dans notre pays de droit et de tradition écrits, le rôle formidable joué par la mémoire orale a trop longtemps été négligé. Aujourd’hui, au contraire, on assiste à une inflation du phénomène de mémoire qui rejoint et, parfois même, envahit l’actualité. Les débats récents sur des lois applicables à l’histoire ne sont-ils pas liés à ce développement spectaculaire de la mémoire collective ? Les sciences sociales s’attachent à comprendre le rôle de la mémoire et à aider ainsi le législateur à effectuer certains choix difficiles. En Normandie, comme ailleurs, la culture est plurielle, élaborée grâce à la sédimentation d’apports sociaux et ethniques multiples. La présence de groupes issus d’une immigration plus ou moins lointaine est particulièrement sensible en milieu urbain. Elle est favorisée par la présence des ports et toujours connectée à une demande de main d’œuvre généralement suscitée par les reconstructions et l’aménagement du territoire d’après 1945. Quels apports entretiennent les membres de ces groupes avec la tradition de leur pays d’origine ? Quelle est la culture propre aux différents groupes socioprofessionnels ? Existe-t-il une mémoire particulière aux gens de mer, aux ouvriers, aux habitants des différents quartiers, ainsi qu’une manière particulière d’utiliser cette mémoire ? Quelle valeur peut-on accorder à un récit de vie ? Voici quelques-unes des questions qui sont abordées dans cet ouvrage, fruit d’une réflexion menée par les deux régions Haute et Basse Normandie lors du colloque sur la mémoire orale.

Forme confessante, bibliciste et conversionniste du protestantisme, l'évangélisme est implanté en Alsace de longue date et bénéficie depuis quelques années d'un regain de dynamisme et de visibilité sociale dans un monde marqué par le « retour du religieux ». La présente étude dresse un état des lieux de l'évangélisme alsacien con­temporain, et tente d'analyser l'identité à la fois unitaire et multiforme du mouvement évangélique, ainsi que ses rapports avec la réalité extérieure (État, société, autres églises), tant en Alsace que dans le contexte mondial. Se méfiant des structures centralisées, comment l'évangélisme gère-t-il sa diversité interne ? Animé d'un zèle missionnaire, organisé le plus souvent en églises indépendantes et parfois de fondation récente, comment est-il perçu par la société environnante et comment cherche-t-il à fonder sa légitimité religieuse, juridique et sociale ? Enfin, se réclamant du message biblique, quels rapports, choisis ou inévitables, l'évangélisme entretient-il avec la modernité ?

The Great Plains of the United States have played an influential role in shaping academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because of the well-documented violence that was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican settlement there. However, violence has deep roots on the Plains, and these roots have never been examined systematically across the region as a whole. Covering the Plains as well as some adjacent areas and spanning both pre-Contact and post-Contact periods, this volume explores a series of central topics that are important regionally and to the larger study of warfare in general. The editors provide an overview of the evidence for violence in the region as a whole, but contributors focus particularly on three important and interrelated topics: what fortifications tell us about war, what representations of war in art tell us about combatants’ views of war, and how war shaped and reflected human societies on the Plains.

En apparence, l’anthropologie de la nature est une sorte d’oxymore puisque, depuis plusieurs siècles en Occident, la nature se caractérise par l’absence de l’homme, et l’homme par ce qu’il a su surmonter de naturel en lui. Mais la nature n’existe pas comme une sphère de réalités autonomes pour tous les peuples. En postulant une distribution universelle des humains et des non-humains dans deux domaines ontologiques séparés, nous sommes bien mal armés pour analyser tous ces systèmes d’objectiva...

This chapter seeks to highlight some of the hypothe-ses about the contribution of cultural and creative in-dustries to the growth and economic development of nations. The authors show the recognition advances of cultural industries in the context of a dynamic sector of the Ecuadorian economy. Thus, the chapter starts reflecting on the concept of cultural and creative activ-ities as part of a strategic and productive sector as well as of an activity that generates an intangible value of symbolic wealth, which leads to a process of revaluation and recognition of these industries as transversal axes of targeted public policies in the economic develop-ment generation. Findings show that it is necessary to review some stablished elements in the national agenda from studies based on opportunities generation in the fields of cinematography, music, publishing, performing arts and design. The existing relations between growth, economic development and culture are gathered from a theoretical review, in order to study some statistical collected data in relation to the analyzed country.

The book is devoted to the fundamental aspects of the non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of many-particle systems. The concept of Zubarev’s approach, which generalizes the notion of Gibbs’ ensembles, and introduces a nonequilibrium statistical operator, providing an adequate basis for dealing with strongly correlated systems that are governed by nonperturbative phenomena, such as the formation of bound states, quantum condensates and the instability of the vacuum. Besides a general introduction to the formalism, this book contains contributions devoted to the applications of Zubarev’s method to the solution of modern problems in different fields of physics: transport theory, hydrodynamics, high-energy physics, quark-gluon plasma and hadron production in heavy-ion collisions. The book provides valuable information for researchers and students in these fields, requiring powerful concepts to solve fundamental problems of non-equilibrium phenomena in strongly

The present work describes a charging management with integrated charging optimization for electric vehicles that can be provided to a fleet by a fleet operator or to a group of private customers by a loading infrastructure operator. Aim of this charging optimization is the calculation of an optimized charging plan by considering the electricity price as well as hard capacity boundaries and user requirements. This charging optimization is designed and implemented within the scope of this work.

Identification and development of cancer biomarkers and targets have greatly accelerated progress towards precision medicine in oncology. Studies of tumor biology have not only provided insights into the mechanisms underlying carcinogenesis, but also led to discovery of molecules that have been developed into cancer biomarkers and targets. Multi-platforms for molecular characterization of tumors using next-generation genomic sequencing, immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, and blood-based biopsies have greatly expanded the portfolio of potential biomarkers and targets. These cancer biomarkers have been developed for diagnosis, early detection, prognosis, and prediction of treatment response. The molecular targets have been exploited for anti-cancer therapy and delivery of therapeutic agents. This Special Issue of Biomedicines focuses on recent advances in the discovery, characterization, translation, and clinical application of cancer biomarkers and targets in malignant diseases of the digestive system. The goal is to stimulate basic and translational research and clinical collaboration in this exciting field with the hope of developing strategies for prevention and early detection/diagnosis of cancer in digestive organs, and improving therapeutic and psychosocial outcomes in patients with these malignant diseases.

Collective monograph contains the results of scientific research devoted to new views and proposals for the diagnosis of certain diseases. The proposed solutions are important for clinical practice and inspire optimism in obtaining encouraging results in overcoming some pathologies. Chapter 1 is dedicated to endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography - a contrast study of the bile ducts and ductal system of the pancreas, which is achieved by their cannulation with the help of a flexible endoscope and their visualization by X-ray (fluoroscopy). Thanks to this, it becomes possible to diagnose and perform medical interventions for choledocholithiasis, benign and malignant obstruction of the bile ducts, chronic pancreatitis accompanied by obstruction of the pancreatic ducts. Chapter 2 presents the results of the development of a thermoelectric device for diagnosing inflammatory processes and pain syndrome in degenerative-dystrophic diseases of the lumbosacral spine. Such a device makes it possible to save, process and visualize measurement results on the display of the device and on a personal computer in real time. The results of clinical studies of thermometric indicators in the lumbosacral region of the spine in persons with chronic pain syndrome against the background of degenerative-dystrophic pathology of the spine in the presence of hernias and protrusions of intervertebral discs are given. The effectiveness of the proposed thermoelectric device in medical practice has been confirmed. Chapter 3 presents the results of the examination of various contingents of the population: students, athletes, mobile operators, people with hearing loss, post-covid syndrome and psychophysiological lability developed under martial law. The features of information processing by examinees with different degrees of functional mobility of nervous processes are highlighted. It was found that the deprivation of auditory function, post-conviction syndrome, psychophysiological lability developed in the conditions of martial law significantly reduce the level of neural processes and the ability to process information. The evaluation scales of neurodynamic and sensorimotor functions proposed for use in the medical field can be used to optimize diagnosis and increase the effectiveness of monitoring neurological morbidity, including in people with special needs. Chapter 4 is devoted to the problems of children's neuropsychiatric diseases, in particular brain damage in children with ASD. Restrained optimism is expressed for the prospect of overcoming this severe psychiatric pathology in the foreseeable future due to the introduction of genetic, biochemical and immunodiagnostic approaches, as well as metabolic and immunotherapeutic interventions with neuroprotective effects. Arguments are presented in favor of the fact that the successful testing in clinical practice of evidence-based personalized multidisciplinary strategies of diagnosis and treatment will allow a breakthrough in the clinical management of children with severe mental disorders in the near future. This will provide not only the possibility of recovery from a prognostically unfavorable and currently incurable neuropsychiatric disorder, but will also contribute to stopping the large-scale threatening epidemic of neuropsychiatric syndromes in the modern child population. Chapter 5 presents the evolution of views on the problem of Internet addiction, provides information on its prevalence, comorbidity with mental disorders, and provides an overview of modern clinical classifications and psychometric tools for its diagnosis. A single definition of "cyber addiction" is singled out, based on the fact that the object of addiction is interaction with various information resources and technical means. The proposed clinical diagnostic criteria, which are based on the criteria for the diagnosis of mental and behavioral disorders due to the use of psychoactive substances ICD-11, and the characteristics of the boundary with normative behavior when using various information resources and technical means are provided. The development and validation of a new psychodiagnostic screening tool based on the proposed cyber addiction paradigm, the YSCAS scale, is presented. The monograph is intended for doctors and practitioners who are engaged in the search and implementation of effective diagnostic methods to overcome the problems associated with the detection and treatment of certain pathologies. The monograph can also be useful to postgraduate and master's students of universities in the relevant educational and scientific profile.

In the current policy environment in Finland, labour migration is portrayed as a solution for the sustenance of the ageing welfare state. However, foreign professional qualifications are generally less valued than those of native-born citizens, particularly for racialized migrants coming from outside the 'west'. Such devaluation of human capital is prevalent in nursing, where the menial basic care has turned into a 'migrant's job', whereas clinical work is left for those considered as 'natives'. In this chapter, we examine how the Filipino registered nurses' professional skills are systematically devalued, as they are recruited to Finnish eldercare as enablers of the future welfare state. We demonstrate how Filipino nurses are produced as highly skilled export commodities in the Philippines, only to be deskilled upon entry to the Finnish labour markets as embedded in the EU. In conclusion, we outline policy measures that would make the transnational recruitment processes more ethical.

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