Economists have long sought to maximise economic growth, believing this to be their best contribution to improving human welfare. That approach is not sustainable in the face of ongoing issues such as global climate change, environmental damage, rising inequality and enduring poverty. Alternatives must be found.
This book addresses that challenge....
Technical Systems-of-Systems (SoS) – in the form of networked, independent constituent computing systems temporarily collaborating to achieve a well-defined objective – form the backbone of most of today's infrastructure. The energy grid, most transportation systems, the global banking industry, the water-supply system, the military equipm...
This book shows the factors linking information flow, social intelligence, rights management and modelling with epistemic democracy, offering licensed linked data along with information about the rights involved. This model of democracy for the web of data brings new challenges for the social organisation of knowledge, collective innovation, and th...
This open access volume provides evidence-based knowledge on European solidarity and citizen responses in times of crisis. Does the crisis of European integration translate into a crisis of European solidarity, and if yes, what are the manifestations at the level of individual citizens? How strongly is solidarity rooted at the individual level, bot...
This book explores the collision between the sustainable energy transition and the Internet of Things (IoT). In that regard, this book's arrival is timely. Not only is the Internet of Things for energy applications, herein called the energy Internet of Things (eIoT), rapidly developing but also the transition towards sustainable energy to abat...
This survey on the modernity of ethnomathematics addresses numerous themes related to both ethnomathematics and mathematics education. It offers a broader view of mathematics, including ideas, procedures, concepts, processes, methods, and practices rooted in distinct cultural environments. In addition, by reflecting on the social and political dime...
There is wide agreement on the need to change the prevalent agricultural models, given their negative impacts and their incompatibility with current societal issues. Agroecological transition has been promoted as a potential solution to the ecological, social and economic problems generated by these models. It however involves a systemic, multi-sca...
This book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broa...
This volume seeks to further the use of formal methods in clarifying one of the central problems of philosophy: that of our free human agency and its place in our indeterministic world. It celebrates the important contributions made in this area by Nuel Belnap, American logician and philosopher.Philosophically, indeterminism and free action can see...
This book marks the first historical overview of the autism rights branch of the neurodiversity movement, describing the activities and rationales of key leaders in their own words since it organized into a unique community in 1992. Sandwiched by editorial chapters that include critical analysis, the book contains 19 chapters by 21 authors about th...
This book establishes the foundations needed to realize the ultimate goals for artificial intelligence, such as autonomy and trustworthiness. Aimed at scientists, researchers, technologists, practitioners, and students, it brings together contributions offering the basics, the challenges and the state-of-the-art on trusted autonomous systems in a s...
This book presents a qualitative longitudinal panel-study on child and adolescent socialisation in socially disadvantaged families. The study traces how children and their parents make sense of media within the context of their everyday life over twelve years (from 2005 to 2017) and provides a unique perspective on the role of different socialisati...
At the core of institutional theories, 'values' is a central term and figures in most definitions; however it remains understudied and under-explored. The editors of this open access book identify a resurgence of interest in the values-construct which underpins discussions of identity, 'ethos' and the purpose/nature of public an...
This free book is about the development of a common understanding of environmental citizenship. It conceptualizes and frames environmental citizenship taking an educational perspective. Organized in four complementary parts, the book first explains the political, economic and societal dimensions of the concept. Next, it examines environmental citiz...
This book summarizes work being pursued in the context of the CIPRNet (Critical Infrastructure Preparedness and Resilience Research Network) research project, co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project is intended to provide concrete and on-going support to the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) r...
This book features essays written by philosophers, biologists, ecologists and conservation scientists facing the current biodiversity crisis. Despite increasing communication, accelerating policy and management responses, and notwithstanding improving ecosystem assessment and endangered species knowledge, conserving biodiversity continues to be mor...
This open access book provides an exploration of the consequences of the ontological differences between natural and social objects (sometimes described as objects of nature and objects of thought) in the workings of causal and agency relationships. One of its important and possibly original conclusions is that causal and agency relationships do no...
This book examines key aspects of international cooperation to enhance nuclear safety, security, safeguards, and non-proliferation, thereby assisting in development and maintenance of the verification regime and fostering progress toward a nuclear weapon-free world. The book opens by addressing important political, institutional, and legal dimensio...
How does the brain orchestrate perceptions, thoughts, and actions from the activity of its neurons? Addressing these challenging issues requires methods with sufficiently high temporal and spatial resolution of neuronal activity in both local and global networks as well as theories to advance understanding how different levels of brain dynamics int...
This bestselling book is now the standard guide to building phone systems with Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that has traditional telephony providers running scared! Revised for the 1.4 release of the software, the new edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony reveals how you can save money on equipment and support, and finally be in control ...
This book is about digital games, the people who play digital games, and how they play them. This poses a large problem: even when discussing one game, each instance of play is different. Combine this with the thousands of digital games, and the millions of players, and it is apparent that the number of individual instances of game play is unfathom...
This module is focused on the study of Free Software in relation with the private sector and the economic implications of its use and development models. We analyse the software industry from an economic perspective: how it was affected by the raise of free software and what is its potential for the future. On the other hand, we study how to use Fr...
This open access book describes the technologies needed to construct a secure big data infrastructure that connects data owners, analytical institutions, and user institutions in a circle of trust. It begins by discussing the most relevant technical issues involved in creating safe and privacy-preserving big data distribution platforms, and especia...
This book is a uniquely pedagogical while still comprehensive state-of-the-art description of LCA-methodology and its broad range of applications. The five parts of the book conveniently provide: I) the history and context of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with its central role as quantitative and scientifically-based tool supporting society’s trans...
This textbook examines the extent to which moral values play a role as productive forces for the economy, and explores the effect of ethical and unethical Behavior on the economy. It shows how ethics improves productivity in the economy, and provides specific ethics tools for practical application for students and managers. Stemming from an overall...
In this book, we describe the components of a launch plan at Google and offer practical methods you might apply to reduce production launch risks for your own products. We include lessons we have learned about what works well for launching Google products, including large products, new features for existing products, and even small products. The le...
Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives while interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple acc...
Imagine a situation where your services report healthy and serving but you receive multiple user reports of poor availability. How are these users accessing your service? Most likely, they are using your service through a client application, such as a mobile application on their phone. SRE traditionally has only supported systems and services run i...
This book vividly presents the story of Margery Spring Rice, an instrumental figure in the movements of women's health and family planning in the first half of the twentieth century. Margery Spring Rice, née Garrett, was born into a family of formidable female trailblazers - niece of physician and suffragist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and of...
There is agency in all we do: thinking, doing, or making. We invent a tune, play, or use it to celebrate an occasion. Or we make a conceptual leap and ask more abstract questions about the conditions for agency. They include autonomy and self-appraisal, each contested by arguments immersing us in circumstances we don't control. But can it be t...
Rider is the new .NET-centric IDE from JetBrains. In Rider Succinctly, author Dmitri Nesteruk introduces it to developers and provides an overview on its origins, functions, and features. With this ebook, readers will be ready to begin developing using Rider....
When processing text files, the awk language is ideal for handling data extraction, reporting, and data-reformatting jobs. This practical guide serves as both a reference and tutorial for POSIX-standard awk and for the GNU implementation, called gawk. This book is useful for novices and awk experts alike.
In this thoroughly revised 5th edition, ...