Computer ScienceScience & MathematicsEconomics & FinanceBusiness & ManagementPolitics & GovernmentHistoryPhilosophy
Wellbeing Economics
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....
Socioeconomics of Agriculture
This book applies for the first time emerging concepts of socioeconomics to analyse an economic sector, namely agriculture. It considers the rational choices of all actors in the system (just as agricultural economists do) and their cultural preferences and constraints (just as rural sociologists do). Socioeconomic concepts are subsequently used to...
Deltas in the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is the human-dominated modern era that has accelerated social, environmental and climate change across the world in the last few decades. This book examines the challenges the Anthropocene presents to the sustainable management of deltas, both the many threats as well as the opportunities. In the world's deltas the Anthropocen...
Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will
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...
Why Knowing What To Do Is Not Enough
This book sets out to explain the reasons for the gap between "knowing" and "doing" in view of self-reliance, which is more and more often expected of citizens. In today's society, people are expected to take responsibility for their own lives and be self-reliant. This is no easy feat. They must be on constant high alert in...
Enabling Things to Talk
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging network superstructure that will connect physical resources and actual users. It will support an ecosystem of smart applications and services bringing hyper-connectivity to our society by using augmented and rich interfaces. Whereas in the beginning IoT referred to the advent of barcodes and Radio Freque...
Dynamics of Long-Life Assets
The editors present essential methods and tools to support a holistic approach to the challenge of system upgrades and innovation in the context of high-value products and services. The approach presented here is based on three main pillars: an adaptation mechanism based on a broad understanding of system dependencies; efficient use of system knowl...
New Vision 2050
This book presents the "New Vision 2050," which adds the concept of the "platinum society" to the "Vision 2050".The 20th century was a century in which energy led the development of material civilization, resulting in deletion of resources, global warming and climate change. What form should sustainable material and en...
Nuel Belnap on Indeterminism and Free Action
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...
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
How do we evaluate ambiguous concepts such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice? How do we develop policies that offer everyone the best chance to achieve what they want from life? The capability approach, a theoretical framework pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s, has become an increasingly influential way to ...
Graph Algorithms
Learn how graph algorithms can help you leverage relationships within your data to develop intelligent solutions and enhance your machine learning models. With this practical guide, developers and data scientists will discover how graph analytics deliver value, whether they're used for building dynamic network models or forecasting real-world ...
Safety Cultures, Safety Models
The objective of this book is to help at-risk organizations to decipher the "safety cloud", and to position themselves in terms of operational decisions and improvement strategies in safety, considering the path already travelled, their context, objectives and constraints. What link can be established between safety culture and safety mod...
Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics
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...
Performance Tuning with SQL Server Dynamic Management Views
Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions. Why, then, aren't all DBAs using them? Why do many DBAs continue to ignore them in favour of &quo...
SQL Server Hardware
SQL Server Hardware will provide the fundamental knowledge and resources you need to make intelligent decisions about choice, and optimal installation and configuration, of SQL Server hardware, operating system and the SQL Server RDBMS. Relational databases place heavy demands on their underlying hardware and many of these databases are mission-...
Security in an Interconnected World
This open access book follows the idea that security policy must be based on strategic analysis. Defence policy and the role of the armed forces can subsequently be determined on the grounds of said analysis. More than ever, internal and external security, and developments both in the Netherlands and abroad are interconnected. The world order is sh...
Economics as Applied Ethics
This important textbook has been revised and updated to continue its focus on the link between ethics and economic policy analysis, whilst ensuring that perspectives addressing the moral limits of the market, latest behavioural economics literature, and the changes in inequality over the years are included. Basic philosophical concepts are systemat...
Managing Sustainable Business
This book offers 32 texts and case studies from across a wide range of business sectors around a managerial framework for Sustainable Business. The case studies are developed for and tested in executive education programmes at leading business schools.The book is based on the premise that the key for managing the sustainable business is finding the...
Introducing Microsoft Power BI
Introducing Microsoft Power BI enables you to evaluate when and how to use Power BI. Get inspired to improve business processes in your company by leveraging the available analytical and collaborative features of this environment. This book is targeted to a variety of readers. There are information workers and people who are totally new to the B...
The Piracy Crusade
In the decade and a half since Napster first emerged, forever changing the face of digital culture, the claim that "internet pirates killed the music industry" has become so ubiquitous that it is treated as common knowledge. Piracy is a scourge on legitimate businesses and hard-working artists, we are told, a "cybercrime" simila...
Data Visualization in Society
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasi...
Discrete Mathematics
Discrete Mathematics: An Open Introduction is a free, open source textbook appropriate for a first or second year undergraduate course for math majors, especially those who will go on to teach. Since Spring 2013, the book has been used as the primary textbook or a supplemental resource at more than 75 colleges and universities around the world (see...
Environmental Valuation with Discrete Choice Experiments
This open book offers up-to-date advice and practical guidance on how to undertake a discrete choice experiment as a tool for environmental valuation. It discusses crucial issues in designing, implementing and analysing choice experiments. Compiled by leading experts in the field, the book promotes discrete choice analysis in environmental valuatio...
Parenting and Work in Poland
The open book provides a critical account of parenthood in Polish society. It uses a qualitative perspective to show how mothers and fathers engage with parenthood and also function in the labour market. Parenting in contemporary Poland is not only affected by individual preferences and choices, but significantly by the institutional context, in pa...
Researching Elites and Power
This open book describes how elite studies theoretically and methodologically construct their object, i.e. how particular conceptualizations of elites are turned into research practice using different methods for collecting, dealing with and analyzing empirical data. The first of four sections focuses on what Mills named the power elite and include...
Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis
Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to...
Architect Modern Web Applications with ASP.NET Core and Azure
The audience for this guide is mainly developers, development leads, and architects who are interested in building modern web applications using Microsoft technologies and services in the cloud. A secondary audience is technical decision makers who are already familiar ASP.NET or Azure and are looking for information on whether it makes sense to...
Blazor, A Beginners Guide
Blazor, A Beginners Guide is intended for developers with some .NET experience. If you're coming from a non-.NET development background, you may learn some .NET basics along the way, but supplemental material around C# and .NET would be of great help to you. The book begins with the author's own perspective on WebAssembly, why it'...
Application Delivery and Load Balancing in Microsoft Azure
With more and more companies moving on-premises applications to the cloud, software and cloud solution architects alike are busy investigating ways to improve load balancing, performance, security, and high availability for workloads. This practical book describes Microsoft Azure's load balancing options and explains how NGINX can contribute t...
Who Saved the Parthenon?
In this magisterial book, William St Clair unfolds the history of the Parthenon throughout the modern era to the present day, with special emphasis on the period before, during, and after the Greek War of Independence of 1821 - 32. Focusing particularly on the question of who saved the Parthenon from destruction during this conflict, with the help ...
Becoming a Scholar
Becoming a Scholar provides a window into the lives of nine non-traditional doctoral students. As mature, part-time, international students enrolled in a professional doctorate programme, they reflect on the transformation process of becoming scholars, and their narratives provide breadth and depth to themes that represent a diverse cross-section o...