There is a curious incident in the first episode of the television seriesStranger Things. The four teenage boys Will, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas arecut short in the middle of theDungeons & Dragonssession they are con-ducting in Mike’s basement. The game ends, rather unfortunately, witha dice roll miscast on the floor. It’s dinnertime, and the boys have to gohome without finishing their campaig…
Luck is all around us.1 There is a certain school of cultural anthropology that is intent on tracking the structures, categories and beliefs that recur across all human societies, transcending the profound differences in history and culture that separate them. This school of ambitious universalists – which is by no mean uncontroversial, both within the field of anthropology…
2022 is a landmark year for BirdLife and conservation. One hundred years ago, in 1922, a group of visionary conservationists concerned about the plight of the world’s birds and wider biodiversity came together to found one of the world’s first international conservation organisations – the International Committee for Bird Protection (ICBP). This network has steadily grown over the last ce…
In this book, we have attempted to break new ground. Our study is unique in several respects: not only does it produce a set of maps for a remote and poorly known area of Australia, but also the distributional point data of each species are integrated and compared with the spatial distribution of their larval food plants. The geographic range of each …
The scene of fasciation in the novel, as such, spreads beyond its most compelling and tragic evocation, illustrating Wildeve’s orientation towards Eustacia and vice versa. The subsection titled ‘Fascination’ begins with the ‘system’ of Clym’s face and figure, moving through a series of encounters and settings in which the phenomenon takes hold or e…
For the Maya, the landscape in which they live, the k’aax (forest), has a moral ecology. It is the place where they feel “at home in the world,” where they are situated in an everyday engagement with their environment. It is also where their history, identity, spiritual beliefs, communion with other species, and ulti-mately their survival are rooted. The ethnic boundary that t…
On June 3, 1992, presidential hopeful Bill Clinton performed a saxo-phone rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on The Arsenio Hall Show.1 In doing so, he aligned himself with perhaps the most recogniz-able music celebrity of all time—a cultural icon whom rock critic Greil Marcus described as “the country’s most extreme embodiment o…
n July 2016, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded my proposal to develop “visual case studies” to highlight institutions and their approaches, with the hope that insights into their successes would be valuable for anyone interested in the evolving story of higher education. I invited seven leaders from the Frontier Set to participate in our research so we could highlight their unique …
Although many music education policies outline an explicit agenda for diversity,little attention has been paid to the complex situations that arise when negotiatingdiversity in practice.The Politics of Diversity in Music Educationaims to remedythis knowledge gap by critically attending to the ways in which difference ispromoted, represented, negotiated, navigated, contained, or challenged in va…
These listings provided the now vanished cinematic geography of prewar Paris. One could chart how movies moved through neighborhoods, the de-velopment (and closure) of cinemas, and the relative importance of movies to diferent parts of town (typically around eighteen cinemas in the periph-eral, working-class twentieth arrondissement and none in the firs…
Ozu Yasujiro found himself pacing through the dark. It was De-cember 12, 1936 and it seemed that the world was shifting. The director hardly ever worried, his lead actor Ryu Chishu recalled, but that morning he looked as he if were “drifting, like a frag-ment of a cloud, along an ever-widening spiral,”1 first circling around the camera, then around the dining ro…
Round dances are a group of dances that rose to fame with the Waltzaround 1800 and stayed in fashion until the end of the nineteenth century. Although they had lost their fashionable status by the twentieth century, some of these dances remained popular in many countries alongside the new African-American1 dances such as the Tango and Foxtrotthroughout the twent…
he travel buddies nevertheless make it to Chile, where they need to resort to some tricks to cope with financial problems. They pose as famous ‘leper experts’ for a local newspaper, winning the esteem (and help) of the locals, and they develop an ‘anniversary routine’ to convince others to pay them a free lunch on the occasion of their supposed one-year anniversary of touring. They also…
South Africa is rich in floral biodiversity as well as cultural diversity. The Cape region1 of South Africa has veldt types, with one of the richest compositions of indigenous aromatic plant species in the country. One such aromatic plant is the genus Agathosma. There are about 150 different species within this genus, which derives from a greater fa…
The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production, circulation, and reproduction of images. Thanks to changes in printing and imaging technology and shifts in the practices of artists, publishers, and photographers, images became more readily available, in a wider range of media than ever before. Working in the new field of lithography,…
Software is an essential part in various facets of our daily life. Mobility,production, energy supply, economics, and infrastructure, to name only afew examples, strongly depend on software. This software is not always ofhigh quality. Critical issues that arose from poor software quality are evenreported manifold publicly in the press. For example, Denver InternationalAirport opened, delayed, …
The world is rapidly urbanizing. With around 55 per cent of the world’s 7.63 billion people living in urban areas (United Nations, 2019) we are facing conditions of “planetary urbanism” (Friedmann, 2016) and “planetary urbanization” (Brenner & Schmid, 2012; Swyngedouw & Kaika, 2014). The global urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion between 2018 and…
Water is not only the beginning of all things, as the old Greeks had alreadyrealized, but without water, no life on earth is possible, and clean water is also aprecondition for any form of sustainable development. There is enough availablefreshwater on earth (about 91,000 km3) to supply every individual on earth (about7.5 billion in 2020) approx. 12,000l, more than enough to live decently. Howe…
While at medical school in north China during the sec-ond Sino-Japanese war (1936–45), Professor Ma chose to specialise in traditional medicine. As a medical graduate in revolutionary China, he was then allocated a position teaching physiology in Peking Medical College (Beiyi Xueyuan ????), which allowed him ample time for reading the medical classics, a pursuit that he found suited him bette…
Early in the project, Sue Rider suggested I could embed audio-video clips in the book as an auxiliary medium to tell the southern policeman’s story, and Nicholas Farrelly, who was enthusiastic about this idea from the outset, was instrumental in bringing it to fruition. In late 2017, I spent two days in Nakhon Si Thammarat with Khun Tanavit and his HD Team Production cr…
Oral History at a Distance is the first publication to explore both the ideas behind and application of oral history in remote projects. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, working from a distance is now an ongoing and necessary approach in the oral historian’s toolkit. In this volume, the experienced team members of Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History provide a road map for adapting tr…
This book is about the challenges and opportunities that countries face inusing their extractive industries to achieve inclusive development. Its focus ison the developing world, both low-income countries (LICs) and middle-income countries (MICs), drawing upon the experiences of high-incomecountries (HICs) when relevant. Extractive industries have shaped the econ-omies, societies, and politics …
For as long as there has been cinema, there has been the remake; and for as long as there has been the remake, there has been a sense of critical unease about the value of making a film which has ‘already been made’. And yet, wave upon wave of remakes continue to wash over audiences worldwide. Arguably the most prolific global creator of these remakes, Hollywood, has audiences geared up for…
With a roller coaster history of economic boom followed by crushing bust, the Central African Copperbelt has come to epitomise Africa’s faltering ‘Industrial Revolution’.1 Throughout the twentieth century, its large-scale industrial copper mines attracted people, capital and power across national and continental boundaries. Following a protracted period of expansion after 1945,…
This book is about white working-class American men who opposed social democratic labor unions and politics in the century that culminated in the New Deal. It follows five generations of miners who, beginning in the 1850s, discovered and developed a rich swath of zinc and lead that straddled the boundaries between Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. By the 1920s, the Tri-State district le…
A company formed by the young, avowed British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes and his business partner Charles Dunell Rudd, with interests in the diamond mines of the Kimberley and gold mining in the Witwatersrand, became one of the foremost British mining-finance companies in the twentieth century. Emanating from South Africa, the company that Rhodes and Rudd founded, The …
t present, as estimated by FAO, the world produces more or less sufficient food to meet the needs of world population and maintains sufficient food stock to cover nearly 25% of estimated annual utilization. Despite the positive situation on the sup-ply side, FAO’s estimation in 2014–2016 indicated that, globally, 795 million peo-ple were unable to meet their dietary energy requ…
What are the practical implications of truly caring about yourself and others, of approaching each day with an open mind, an open heart, and a desire to reduce the suffering of all living beings? Can we learn compassion as a way of life, as an antidote to violence and cruelty? In The Seven Virtues of Highly Compassionate People, social scientists Nancy Guerra and Kirk R. Williams provide easy-t…
A successful translator sued a plagiarist for the uncanny simi-larity of some five lines in the latter’s recent edition of the com-plete poems of Rimbaud, the previous addition of which hav-ing earned the translator much of his reputation and present livelihood. The translator resented not only the plagiarism, he said before the court, but the velocity at …
Sometimes animals surprise us by doing something that seems uncannily human-like.Marmosets (South American monkeys of the family Callitrichidae) are tiny, weighing only around 300–400g, and though they are primates they look entirely unlike humans, perhaps even a little more like squirrels. However, like humans they form pair bonds, and collaborate in childcare…
nterest of scientists has been deviating since 20th century, from the use of animals intheir experimental work towards substituting with‘Alternatives’, thus reducing the useof live animals in experiments. This‘Alternative’concept is principally the‘Replacement’alternative that was indicated in the book;‘The Principles of HumaneExperimental Technique’written by Russell and Burch …
In May 1951, Francisco Franco attended an international social security congressin Madrid. In the audience were experts and officials from across Spain, LatinAmerica, and western Europe, including ministers from various foreign govern-ments and representatives from international bodies such as the InternationalLabour Organization (ILO). Addressing the conference, Franco told delegates thattwo f…
The present research is based on several years of study and on visits to Morocco and Chefchaouen. It began in 2005, as a participation in an international cooperation project funded by the Tuscan region, which had as partners in Italy the SPEF Scuola Profession-ale Edile of Florence and the TaeD Department of Architecture and Design Technolo-gies "Pierluigi Spadolini" of Florence and as partner…
The Dutch limes zone roughly comprises a 50 km wide strip in the middle of the Netherlands, stretching from the North Sea until Germany over a distance of approximately 150 km from west to east. To the north, the zone is bordered by the course of the Rhine, which was established as the northern frontier of the Roman Empire around the middle of the first century CE. The Romans never …
Glass bead studies, using increasingly sophisticated methods, have become important in examining archaeological questions related to technology, chronology, and exchange in the ancient world. In this introductory chapter, the goal is to provide a context for the case studies presented in this volume, within the broader field of glass bead studies. For that purpose, we briefly review th…
In the past few years, there has been a significant increase in the use and development of KGs and their various applications. These KGs are designed to store world knowledge, represented as triples (i.e., .) consisting of entities, relations, and other entities, with each entity referring to a distinct real-world object, and each relation repre…
Levees are typically very long structures built above the natural ground level to either channel water or prevent it from flowing through. Excluding those built along canals, levees are designed to protect certain areas against river or marine flooding. This handbook only addresses riverine flood protection levees that pro-vide partial or total protection against floodplain inundation.As we wil…
The ‘universal value’ of vernacular architectural heritage in the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage List, although more or less recognised and considered in the holistic dimension of their integration in-to exceptional cultural contexts, which are themselves listed, is still very limited as shown by the 11211properties inscribed on this list to date, in 2020. The tangible and intangible val…
Rice straw is a residual byproduct of rice production at harvest. The total biomass of this residue depends on various factors such as varieties, soils and nutrient man-agement and weather. At harvest, rice straw is piled or spread in the field depending on the harvesting methods, using stationary threshers or self-propelled combine harvesters, respectively. The amount of rice straw t…
TheD. ?ak ?arn.ava(“Ocean ofD. ?akas”) is one of the last Tantric scriptures amongthose belonging to the Buddhist Sam.vara tradition. It consists of 51 chapters. Asdiscussed in Section 2 in this monograph, it was developed sometime between thelate-10th and mid-12th centuries, and the basic text of its extant version was mostlikely completed around the early 12th century in the eastern par…
Traditional concrete has a limited fluidity and needs to be actively compacted. Its performance has now been scientifically surpassed by highly technological mixtures based on multiple blends of powders combined with specially designed admixtures, showing rheological properties that make the fresh material self-compacting [1]. In spite of its many advantages (reduced energy consumpti…
Anthropogenic activity has resulted in the deposition of a complex combination ofmaterials in lake sediments, including synthetic polymers (plastics) that differgreatly from the Holocene signatures. Accordingly, plastics are considered oneindicator of the Anthropocene [1]. Plastic has for some time been known to be amajor component of riverine pollution [2–6], and plastic degradation products…
It is generally agreed that during the 3rd millennium BC (Chalcolithic) and the 2nd millennium BC (Bronze Age) complex transformations of the social dynamics within the diverse communities inhabiting the different regions of Europe occurred. This book intends to revisit such consensus by highlighting how researchers explain these transformations a…
Meliora is the motto of the University of Rochester. It translates to “ever better.” We have chosen Meliora as the theme of this volume and the title of this section. In the one essay in this section, Carlos Stroud documents how from its very incep-tion The Institute had a mission that was different from that of a usual academic department in a…
n an era where environmental sustainability and resource scarcity are becoming increasingly critical concerns, innovative approaches to wastewater treatment and energy recovery have gained significant attention. The convergence of nanotechnology and biotechnology has paved the way for revolutionary solutions that address these challenges in unprecedented ways. This book Nanobiohybrids for Advan…
In recent years, the emergent field of critical infrastructure studies has turned to interdisciplinary analysis of infrastruc-tures as complex worldmaking systems: They produce shared space and time, connect cultures and subjectivities, negotiate power relations, inequalities, or the mediation and circulation of material agency.1 Infrastructures often appear as networks of media technologies th…
Few studies have addressed recent emigration from European countries. The refu-gee crisis and migratory pressure have helped keep academic attention over the last few decades focused on immigration, asylum, reception and integration in Europe. However, these dynamics promoting entries into European countries coexist with other fairly significant dynamics promoting departures fro…
Many processes in nature and technology are influenced by droplet dynamics. Theseinclude ubiquitous phenomena and applications, such as rain clouds or fuel injec-tion into combustion chambers, but also highly advanced devices such as rocketengines or spray based production processes in the pharmaceutical industry. Dueto their omnipresence, droplets have been the focus of scientific interest for…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the core driver for the fourth technological revolution,following the revolutions in steam technology, electricity technology, and computersand information technology. Since its emergence in the 1950s, AI has fully improvedproductivity, affected and changed the production structure and production relations.UnderstandingthehistoryofAIplaysanindispensableroleinthes…
In popular myth Nansen is the archetypal Scandinavian polar explorer – a manly, no- nonsense hero with little time for the sentimentality or plodding amateurism of his British contemporaries.1 However, Nansen’s account of this expedition, Farthest North (1897), reveals someone with a deeply romantic outlook whose musings on the Arctic ‘dreamland’ have much in common with the…