Information and background for travelers and expatriates includes a brief history and description of the country, along with facts about the food, language, culture, and pastimes to help the "shocked" function in society, business, and residence.
With over three million copies in print, CultureShock! is a bestselling series of culture and etiquette guides covering countless destinations around the world. For anyone at risk of culture shock, whether a tourist or a longterm resident, CultureShock! provides a sympathetic and fun-filled crash course on the do's and don'ts in foreign cultures. Fully updated and sporting a fresh new look, the…
Today, South Korea is an economic, technological and entertainment superpower. How, as a country, did they rebound from war, poverty and political unrest? And how can that success be replicated in other cultures? The answers can, in fact, be found by understanding Korean customs, values and beliefs. Author Boye Lafayette De Mente identifies the unique qualities that comprise the Korean identity…
Soils long have been taken for granted being so commonplace and lacking often striking features. However, soil is one of the most complex media on Earth, vital for the biogeosphere and human civilization. With increased usage of soil for world food production, building materials, waste repositories, etc awareness has grown for the need of better global understanding of soil and its processes. …
The proof, at last, that we do all live in a random and irrational universe. For centuries scientists believed that the universe was a vast machine - with enough detail, you could predict exactly what would happen. Admittedly real life wasn't like that. But only, they argued, because we didn't have enough data to be certain. Then the cracks began to appear. It proved impossible to predict…
In Science for Life acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg cuts through the vested interests and confusing contradictory statements that litter the media and the internet, to give a clear picture of what science is telling us right now about changing our lives for the better. Discover the much-advertised antioxidants that aren't good for you, the truth about fat and sugar and why one of the he…
Open Access to the results of scientific research brings promising and democratic solutions to enlighten citizens. It may contribute to upgrade the quality of scientific information and to raise the level of ac-ceptance of common scientific representations amongst the population. However, this is far from being systematic: in the same time when huge scientific progress enabled the making of a v…
This edited volume of chapters resulted from an international conference held at the University of Adelaide in July 2016 under the same title to explore the multifaceted concept of ?ilm in Islam — its agency and manifestations in the connected realms of science, religion, and the arts. The aim is to explore the Islamic civilisational responses to major shifts in the concept of ‘knowledge’…
Twenty years ago, Wikipedia set out on its path to provide humanity with free access to the sum of all knowledge. Even if this is a mission that can’t be finished, Wikipedia has made remarkable progress toward the impos-sible. How so? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia built on a wiki. And never has an application (gathering the sum of human knowledge) been so suited to its medium (easily …
Libraries on the Agenda shows how to engage in lobbying and advocating for libraries. The book analyzes political elements of power, policy making and human values. Political decision makers from local communities up to the international level need to be convinced, why libraries need their support. This title has an international approach to advocacy and shows many international examples. It pr…
Library science is basically the study of how to operate a library. The field is made up of several branches, including public services, technical services and administration. It is referred to as “library and information science” at many colleges and universities because librarians work with physical books as well as virtual information. Library science (often termed library studies or lib…
For rock engineering projects, the cutting and fragmenting of rocks has attracted much attention. Exploring the fracture characteristics of rocks is helpful in achieving efficient and sustainable excavation for mining and tunneling engineering. The frac-ture toughness of rocks is a crucial mechanical indicator that weighs the initiation and extension…
Given the increasing attention to managing, publishing, and preserving research datasets as scholarly assets, what competencies in working with research data will graduate students in STEM disciplines need to be successful in their fields? And what role can librarians play in helping students attain these competencies? In addressing these questions, this book articulates a new area of opportuni…
The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated ongoing transactions between twenty-first-century biomedical and informational technologies. The sight of hundreds of millions worldwide submitting their bodies to experimental vaccines suggests that the modes of human security laid out by Michel Foucault in his Collège de France lectures may in fact have moved into a new ti…
What is science? Science helps us to answer questions. If we look for evidence and do experiments to terst new ideas, we can understand how and why things work. We divide science into three main areas: chemistry, biology, and physics.
“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” (Shapin 1996, 1). So began Stephen Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution, a work, con-cise and smart, that embodied an approach to the history of science termed “the social construction of science.” Shapin argued that if we are going to talk about a “scientific revolution,” then we need to see it not …
Not all charms fly at the touch of cold philosophy.1 This work examines so-called “cold philosophy,” or science, that does pre-cisely the opposite—rather than mercilessly emptying out and unweaving, it operates as a philosophy that animates. Taking up a selection of popular works by scientists who have engaged in attempts to rail against the idea of disenchantment (En…
Unity in Diversity is not for us explores the lived experiences of primarily Muslim lesbians and trans men (LT+) in Indonesia, where Islam is the majority religion. Using an ethnographic approach, the book traces how LT+ individuals understand their identities and negotiate their gender and desire amidst socio-religious rejection. The analysis illustrates the biographical process of coming of a…
Platforms for open access monographs are fairly new and they are just one aspect of the changes in the way scholarly and scientif ic results are made public. As I became involved in the development of both the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books, questions on optimiza-tion arose. How can we improve these open access book platforms if there are few examples to learn…
Women present a historic and worrying gap in science and technology-related disciplines, generally knowns as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering,and Mathematics), except in the case of health professions. A holistic approach isneeded to support policymakers worldwide in bridging the gender gap in STEM, inwhich higher education institutions have a crucial role. Promoting this active impli-cat…
The point of this story is not to marvel at the way in which an artificial object, intrinsically linked to science and human exploration, can gradually become alien to us. In popular parlance, the alien is that which is strange, inhuman and sometimes hostile. It is often used to describe the possible residents of other planetary bodies, perhaps beyond the edge of our solar system. Our desire to…
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…
My ultimate goal in writing this book is to better position environmental edu-cators to contribute to environmental quality, sustainability, and resilience. To accomplish this goal, I have summarized research-based information on the myriad pathways by which environmental education can contribute to the health of the environment, the community, and individuals. Lik…
After providing an overview of the drones’industry history and its future evolutionfrom a technological point of view as a prologue to the book, in thisfirst chapter acontextualisation of the AiRT project is presented. We start by setting out theidentification of the problems on which the proposal was based, its objectives,methodology and work plan development, including the main achievements…
In 1960, the United States put its first Earth-observing environmental satellite into orbit around the planet. Over the decades, these satellites have provided invaluable information, and the vantage point of space has provided new perspectives on Earth. This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere. The bo…
Science promised to society to contribute to the grand challenges of the United Nations, WHO, the EU agenda and national agendas for change and improvement of our life. It will be discussed how this social contract between science and society has developed since 1945. The first phase from 1945 till 1960 was characterized by autonomy, building on the successes of the natural …
Here is the extraordinary story of the unfolding of life on Earth, told by Michael J. Benton, a world-renowned authority on biodiversity. Ranging over four billion years, Benton weaves together the latest findings on fossils, earth history, evolutionary biology, and many other fields to highlight the great leaps that enabled life to evolve from microbe to human--big breakthroughs that made whol…
Since the invention of the wheel, humankind has been driven to improve the way we travel, always trying to better, faster, and stronger. The How It Works Book of Amazing Vehicles exhibits the finest inventions in the world of transport, documenting iconic vehicles throughout history and providing a sneak peek at what is to come in the future. From the first Ford to the fastest of fighter jets, …
For centuries, scientists have been fascinated by the role of the Sun in the Earth’s climate system. Recent discoveries, outlined in this book, have gradually unveiled a complex picture, in which our variable Sun affects the climate variability via a number of subtle pathways, the implications of which are only now becoming clear. This handbook provides the scientifically curious, from underg…
Botany and plant sciences.
Water plants of all sizes, from the 60-meter long Pacific Ocean giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) to the micro ur-plant blue-green algae, deserve attention from critical plant studies. This is the first book in environmental humanities to approach algae, swimming across the sciences, humanities, and arts, to embody the mixed nature and collaborative identity of algae. Ranging from Medieval Isla…
After cutting into small fragments of their DNA, millions of reads of 100 bases in length and in both directions of reading (forward and reverse) were performed for each of the sixteen plants, also called accessions. Thus, for each accession, a library of short sequences of its genome was obtained. We could compare them to bags containing the pieces of a puzzle that must be assembled…
Besides being a matter of academic interest, the study of earthquake-inducedhydrologic changes also has important implications for water resources, hydro-carbon exploration and engineered systems. For example, groundwater level changesfollowing earthquakes can affect water supplies (Chen and Wang2009). The aban-donment of Crete during the Late Minoan period has been attributed by some to adeple…
Contemporary film and television production is extraordinarily mobile. Filming large-scale studio productions in Atlanta, Budapest, London, Prague, or Australia’s Gold Coast makes Hollywood jobs available to people and places far removed from Southern California—but it also requires individuals to uproot their lives as they travel around the world in pursuit of work. Drawing on interviews w…
This open access book critically examines discussions on digitalisation and individual opportunities for socio-economic advancement. Contrary to the prevailing narratives of “digital empowerment” and opportunities for every individual, this book argues that digitalisation massively curtails social advancement opportunities, consolidating existing social relations. From a spatial perspective…
This book proposes a reconstruction of contemporary social theory, focusing on thematic issues rather than on authors or schools of thought. In so doing, it endeavours to bridge epistemological approaches and locate critical claims shared by the main trajectories and notions of sociological theoretical debate. The book explores the current forms of social science theorization through the key th…
Science promised to society to contribute to the grand challenges of the United Nations, WHO, the EU agenda and national agendas for change and improvement of our life. It will be discussed how this social contract between science and society has developed since 1945. The first phase from 1945 till 1960 was characterized by autonomy, building on the successes of the natural …