This free book explores the strategic importance and advantages of adopting multidisciplinary and multiscalar approaches of inquiry and intervention with respect to the built environment, based on principles of sustainability and circular economy strategies. A series of key challenges are considered in depth from a multidisciplinary perspective, sp...
This free book explores key issues and presents recent case studies in areas of importance for the transition to a circular model of development in emerging African countries that will minimize resource consumption and waste production. The topics covered include the development of sustainable housing models, energy and environmental issues in buil...
This book explores the question of who or what 'the public' is within 'public health' in post-war Britain. Drawing on historical research on the place of the public in public health in Britain from the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948, the book presents a new perspective on the relationship between state and ...
This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Trends in Mathematics a...
In this open access publication, the social cohesion of urban neighborhoods and their residents is examined, which is often viewed as vulnerable since increased mobility, individualization, wider socio-economic and demographic changes have fundamentally altered the basis for everyday social interaction in urban neighborhoods. Anna Steigemann gives ...
This free book provides a glimpse into the Japanese management technique known as "Kaizen," and the ways it has been disseminated around the developing world. The novelty of this book is three-fold: it provides a contextualized view of the mechanisms of initiatives implementing Kaizen in developing countries; compared with productivity st...
By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background...
This open access report presents findings from the five Latin American countries that participated in the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). ICCS 2016 investigated the ways in which a range of countries are preparing their young people to undertake their roles as citizens during the second decad...
This book explores how children, parents, and survivors reshaped the politics of child protection in late twentieth-century England. Activism by these groups, often manifested in small voluntary organisations, drew upon and constructed an expertise grounded in experience and emotion that supported, challenged, and subverted medical, social work, l...
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 free book explores questions such as why and how did the first biological cells appear? And then complex organisms, brains, societies and –now– connected human societies? Physicists have good models for describing the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, but can we apply the same concepts to the evolution of aggregated matter –l...
This open access book explores commentaries on an influential text of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. It features essays that take a close look at key intellectuals and how they engaged with the main ideas of this qualitative introduction to geocentric cosmology.
Johannes de Sacrobosco compiled his Tractatus de sphaera during the thirteenth ce...
This book explores the under-researched history of male mental illness from the mid-twentieth century. It argues that statistics suggesting women have been more vulnerable to depression and anxiety are misleading since they underplay a host of alternative presentations of 'distress' more common in men....
This free book explores the concept of Industry 4.0, which presents a considerable challenge for the production and service sectors. While digitization initiatives are usually integrated into the central corporate strategy of larger companies, smaller firms often have problems putting Industry 4.0 paradigms into practice. Small and medium-sized ent...
This book describes the history, structure and institutions of open and distance education in six countries: China, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and South Korea. It describes how open and distance education is evolving in a digital age to reflect the needs and circumstances of the national higher education systems in these countries. It al...
This free book presents up-to-date analyses of community-based approaches to sustainable resource management of SEPLS (socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes) in areas where a harmonious relationship between the natural environment and the people who inhabit it is essential to ensure community and environmental well-being as well as t...
This free book explores how digital tools and social media technologies can contribute to better participation and involvement of EU citizens in European politics. By analyzing selected representative e-participation projects at the local, national and European governmental levels, it identifies the preconditions, best practices and shortcomings of...
This book about the Zadeh Project demonstrates and explores a core question in clinical ethics: how can ethics consultants be accountable in the face of a robust plurality of ethical standpoints, especially those that underwrite practices and methods for doing ethics consultation as well as those viewpoints and values encountered in daily clinical ...
This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today's history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the...
This book analyses the different types of post-execution punishments and other aggravated execution practices, the reasons why they were advocated, and the decision, enshrined in the Murder Act of 1752, to make two post-execution punishments, dissection and gibbeting, an integral part of sentences for murder. It traces the origins of the Act, and t...
This book presents an incisive outline of the historical development and geography of cities. It focuses on three themes that constitute essential foundations for any understanding of urban form and function. These are: (a) the shifting patterns of urbanization through historical time, (b) the role of cities as centers of production and work in a ...
This open access book provides an overview of childlessness throughout Europe. It offers a collection of papers written by leading demographers and sociologists that examine contexts, causes, and consequences of childlessness in countries throughout the region.The book features data from all over Europe. It specifically highlights patterns of ch...
This open access book addresses several questions regarding the implementation of human and organisational factors (HOF) so that recent improvements in industrial safety can be built upon. It addresses sources of frustration in senior management with high expectations of operational recommendations and disquiet on the part of HOF specialists strugg...
"A landmark study showing how empirical work, through the methodology of the social sciences, can come into contact with political philosophy and disability studies so as to make a meaningful contribution to policy. Dr. Victor Santiago Pineda's work will be read for decades, as a foundation for future research on the application of the ca...
This book explores the dataspace paradigm as a best-effort approach to data management within data ecosystems. It establishes the theoretical foundations and principles of real-time linked dataspaces as a data platform for intelligent systems. The book introduces a set of specialized best-effort techniques and models to enable loose administrative ...
Based on a study among higher-educated adult children of lower-class Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, this open access book explores processes of identification among social climbers with ethnic minority backgrounds. Using both survey data and open interviews with these 'minority climbers', the study details the context...
This open access book explores how contemporary integration policies and practices are not just about migrants and minority groups becoming part of society but often also reflect deliberate attempts to undermine their inclusion or participation. This affects individual lives as well as social cohesion. The book highlights the variety of ways in whi...
This open access report explores the nature and extent of students' misconceptions and misunderstandings related to core concepts in physics and mathematics and physics across grades four, eight and 12. Twenty years of data from the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and TIMSS Advanced assessments are anal...
This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, b...
This open access book discusses transnational trade union cooperation in Europe – its forms, focuses, conditions, and obstacles. It provides an overview of existing trade union cooperation and includes detailed analyses of two specific questions: the debates on statutory minimum wages and the Posting of Workers Directive. Drawing on empirical res...
This open access book – as the title suggests – explores some of the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of perspectivism. Perspectivism has recently emerged in philosophy of science as an interesting new position in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. But there is a lot more to perspectivism than discussions ...
This book introduces readers to the regional geology of Hanggai, Xianxia and Chuancun, the area between China's northern Zhejiang Province and southern Anhui Province and explores the strata, magmatic rocks and tectonic structures in 1:50,000 scale geological maps. Based on studies of multiple stratigraphic divisions, the standard stratigraphi...