Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines.
Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation fo...
In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger's early existential conception of science. Kochan shows convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing.
By combining Heid...
This book collects 4 keynote and 15 theme lectures presented at the 2nd European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (2ECEES), held in Istanbul, Turkey, from August 24 to 29, 2014. The conference was organized by the Turkish Earthquake Foundation - Earthquake Engineering Committee and Prime Ministry, Disaster and Emergency Managemen...
This book offers both conceptual and empirical descriptions of how to "frame" sustainability challenges. It defines "framing" in the context of sustainability science as the process of identifying subjects, setting boundaries, and defining problems. The chapters are grouped into two sections: a conceptual section and a case sect...
This free book revisits the theoretical foundations of urban planning and the application of these concepts and methods in the context of Southern countries by examining several case studies from different regions of the world. For instance, the case of Koudougou, a medium-sized city in one of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso, with ...
This open access volume presents state-of-the-art inference methods in population genomics, focusing on data analysis based on rigorous statistical techniques. After introducing general concepts related to the biology of genomes and their evolution, the book covers state-of-the-art methods for the analysis of genomes in populations, including demog...
To understand how the world's ecosystems are changing we need to understand cities, and to create better cities we need to understand the ecosystems they depend on. The failure of most markets, government policies and even urban studies to take these relations into account has put cities, and increasingly the whole world, in a difficult positi...
"Dr Cassidy draws pertinent general conclusions about generating policy and mediating the role of the expert in today's science-sceptic and increasingly polarised society... It is both a useful and original contribution, specifically to the history of zoonotic disease policy, and policy history more generally."—Helen Bynum, Author ...
This open access volume presents a comprehensive account of all aspects of biological invasions in South Africa, where research has been conducted over more than three decades, and where bold initiatives have been implemented in attempts to control invasions and to reduce their ecological, economic and social effects. It covers a broad range of the...
This book explores the emotional labour of crisis reporters in an original style that combines fictional and factual narrative. Exploring how journalists make sense of their emotional experience and development in relation to their professional ideology, it illustrates how media professionals learn to think and act within crisis situations. Drawing...
This book provides new methodological and theoretical insights into temporal reference and its linguistic expression, from a cross-linguistic experimental corpus pragmatics approach. Verbal tenses, in general, and more specifically the categories of tense, grammatical and lexical aspect are treated as cohesion ties contributing to the temporal cohe...
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 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 provides an authoritative insight on the Loss and Damage discourse by highlighting state-of-the-art research and policy linked to this discourse and articulating its multiple concepts, principles and methods. Written by leading researchers and practitioners, it identifies practical and evidence-based policy options to inform the discourse...
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 open access book offers a summary of the development of Digital Earth over the past twenty years. By reviewing the initial vision of Digital Earth, the evolution of that vision, the relevant key technologies, and the role of Digital Earth in helping people respond to global challenges, this publication reveals how and why Digital Earth is beco...
We must find new and innovative ways of conceptualizing transboundary energy issues, of embedding concerns of ethics or justice into energy policy, and of operationalizing response to them. This book stems from the emergent gap; the need for comparative approaches to energy justice, and for those that consider ethical traditions that go beyond the ...
This book presents a comprehensive survey of modern operator techniques for boundary value problems and spectral theory, employing abstract boundary mappings and Weyl functions. It includes self-contained treatments of the extension theory of symmetric operators and relations, spectral characterizations of selfadjoint operators in terms of the anal...
This book collects 5 keynote and 15 theme lectures presented at the 2nd European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (2ECEES), held in Istanbul, Turkey, from August 24 to 29, 2014. The conference was organized by the Turkish Earthquake Foundation - Earthquake Engineering Committee and Prime Ministry, Disaster and Emergency Managemen...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Semantic Systems, SEMANTiCS 2019, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in September 2019.The 20 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. They cover topics such as: web semantics and linked (open) dat...
This open access book presents the key aspects of statistics in Wasserstein spaces, i.e. statistics in the space of probability measures when endowed with the geometry of optimal transportation. Further to reviewing state-of-the-art aspects, it also provides an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of this current topic, as well as an overvie...
This open book focuses on investigating predicting precursor information and key points of rockburst in mining engineering through laboratory experiment, theoretical analysis, numerical simulation and case studies. Understanding the evolution patterns for the microstructure instability of rock is a prerequisite for rockburst prediction. The book pr...
This book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, ...
This book presents work collected through the Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Projects (LEAP) in 2017. It addresses the repeatability, variability, and sensitivity of lateral spreading observed in twenty-four centrifuge model tests on mildly sloping liquefiable sand. The centrifuge tests were conducted at nine different centrifuge facilitie...
This book illustrates the benefits to be gained from digitally networked communication for health, education and transitioning economies in developing nations (Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea) and developed nations. Growing powers of e-citizenship can help build sustainable futures. This small volume provides a collection of examples and ideas fr...
This book summarizes peer-reviewed articles and the abstracts of oral and poster presentations given during the YOUMARES 9 conference which took place in Oldenburg, Germany, in September 2018. The aims of this book are to summarize state-of-the-art knowledge in marine sciences and to inspire scientists of all career stages in the development of fur...
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, building on research initiated by scholars from the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Global Heritage and Development (CHGD) and ICOMOS Netherlands, presents multidisciplinary research that connects water to heritage. Through twenty-one chapters it explores landscapes, cities, engineering structures and buildings from around the world. It ...
In 1591, Giovanni Paolo Gallucci published his Della simmetria dei corpi humani, an Italian translation of Albrecht Dürer's Four Books on Human Proportion. While Dürer's treatise had been translated earlier in the sixteenth-century into French and Latin, it was Gallucci's Italian translation that endured in popularity as the most c...
Are humans violent or peaceful by nature? We are both.
In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Agner Fog presents a ground-breaking new argument that explains the existence of differently organised societies using evolutionary theory. It combines natural sciences and social sciences in a way that is rarely seen.
According to a concept called...
The human population's annual total consumption is not sustainable by one planet. This unprecedented situation calls for a reform of religious cultures that promote a large ideal family size. Many observers assume that Christianity is inevitably part of this problem because it promotes "family values" and statistically, in America an...