Creating the European Area of Higher Education : Voices from the Periphery
This volume brings together a group of higher education researchers across Europe and looks into the implementation of the Bologna Process in the countries often attributed a peripheral status. Although it is also obvious that if the Process has a center, it stands external to higher education systems and universities it concerns. One can possibly find it either in Brussels or across the Atlantic in the United States, internationally perceived as the main competitor to European higher education. In addition to cultural and political issues the European higher education project faces in various countries, the volume pays particular attention to the role of students as well as the changing position of the intellectuals under its impact.
Creating Resilient Futures : Integrating Disaster Risk Reduction, Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Change Adaptation Agendas
This excellent text recognises that efforts towards improving development outcomes must work in concert with strategies which promote planetary health and support the transition to a sustainable and climate-resilient future.
Creating and Enhancing Digital Astro Images
Digital imaging is now available to all amateur astronomers at a reasonable price. The advent of CCDs, DSLRs and – perhaps most significantly – webcams mean today’s astronomers can make colorful planetary or deep-sky images of breathtaking beauty. The results obtained with even modest equipment can be spectacular, but of course they depend crucially on the computer processing of the images after they have been captured. Enhancing Digital Images is not just an introduction to image processing, it is a deeply practical, comprehensive and fully illustrated in-depth guide to using a digital camera, performing image reduction and undertaking image enhancement – all without jargon or math. Here is everything you need to know about processing digital astronomical images, regardless of whether you are experienced or a relative beginner!
Court Delay and Law Enforcement in China : Civil process and economic perspective
On the basis of an empirical study and taking a comparative as well as an economic perspective Qing-Yun Jiang analyses the problem of court delay and law enforcement in China. He shows that delay is not a serious problem in the lower courts in respect to trial cases, but mainly in appeal cases and retrial cases, which require more time. Moreover, the study confirms that law enforcement has been an obstacle for the development of market economy and a bottleneck of the judiciary. The author concludes that judicial reform should not only deal with symptoms, but with the roots of the political and economic structure.
Counter-Terrorism Policing : Community, Cohesion and Security
This book charts these opportunities and challenges through unprecedented access to the police and diverse communities in Australian regional and metropolitan contexts. It locates these developments in an international comparison with like jurisdictions in the US, UK, and Canada and in light of former conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It examines the nature and impact of counter-terrorism on policing, diverse communities, legislation and policy and on the media. The book concludes by posing questions for the future of counter-terrorism policing in liberal democracies.
Cost-sharing and Accessibility in Higher Education : A Fairer Deal?
Higher education finances lie at the crossroads in many Western countries. On the one hand, the surging demand of the past three or four decades, driven by a belief in higher education as a principal engine of social and economic advancement, has led to dramatic growth of the higher education systems in these countries. On the other hand, this growth in demand was accompanied by rapidly increasing per-student cost pressures at a time when governments seemed increasingly unable to keep pace with these cost pressures through public revenues. Hence, worldwide, the most common approach to the need for increasing revenue was to use some form or forms of cost sharing, or the shift of some of the higher educational per-student costs from governments and taxpayers to parents and students.
Corporate Governance in Japan : From the Viewpoints of Management, Accounting, and the Market
In Japan, the problem of corporate governance has been cogently argued in the ?eld of social science for the past decade, and the issue has also been taken up separately in law, business administration, and accounting. The study presented here proposes that a company should play a social role to bring about a sustainable society.
Copular Sentences In Russian : A Theory of Intra-Clausal Relations
This book provides a detailed study and a novel Minimalist account of copular sentences in Russian, focusing on case marking alternations (nominative vs. instrumental) and drawing a distinction between two types of copular sentences. On the assumption that Merge is defined in the simplest way possible, it is argued that not all syntactic structures are a(nti)symmetrical. One of the copular sentence types is analyzed as a poster child for symmetrical structures, while the other type is treated as asymmetrical. The originality of this study lies in treating the copula in the two types of copular sentences neither as completely identical nor as two distinct lexical items; instead, the two types of copula are derived through the process of semantic bleaching. Furthermore, it is argued that the two types of the copula need to combine with post-copular phrases of different categories. It is concluded that Russian draws a distinction between saturated DPs and unsaturated NPs, in spite of its renowned lack of overt articles.
Coping with Overloaded Criminal Justice Systems : The Rise of Prosecutorial Power Across Europe
The comparative study documented here was supported by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation and the European Commission. It examined prosecution services in different European countries intending to understand their national role and function within the respective criminal justice system and thereby to highlight common features and important differences between European systems. The prosecution service is regarded as a part of the criminal justice system; a coherent system under pressure to deal with high numbers of cases. Within this system the prosecution level is increasingly becoming the decisive stage reducing its workload by means of simplified methods and proceedings.
Conviviality at the Crossroads : The Poetics and Politics of Everyday Encounters
Conviviality has lately become a catchword not only in academia but also among political activists. This open access book discusses conviviality in relation to the adjoining concepts cosmopolitanism and creolisation. The urgency of today’s global predicament is not only an argument for the revival of all three concepts, but also a reason to bring them into dialogue. Ivan Illich envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of ‘autonomous individuals and primary groups’ (Illich 1973), which resembles present-day manifestations of ‘convivialism’. Paul Gilroy refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be ‘at ease’ in contexts of diversity (Gilroy 2004)
Contributions to the Science of Text and Language : Word Length Studies and Related Issues
This volume contains a collection of contributions to the science of language, focusing on the study of word length in particular. Within a synergetic framework, the word turns out to be a central linguistic unit, as is clearly outlined in the Editorâs preface. The bookâs first chapter is an extensive introduction to the history and state of the art of word length studies.The studies included unify contributions from three important linguistic fields, namely, linguistics and text analysis, mathematics and statistics, and corpus and data base design, which together give a comprehensive approach to the quantitative study of text and language and word length studies.
Contributions from Science Education Research
In August 2005, over 500 international researchers from the field of science education met at the 5th European Science Education Research Association conference in Barcelona, Spain. Two of the main topics at this conference were: the decrease in the number of students interested in school science and concern about the worldwide outcomes of studies on students’ scientific literacy. At the conference, over 400 papers were presented, covering a wide range of topics relevant to science education research, such as evidence-based practice, teachers’ professional development, the role of ICT and multimedia, formal and informal learning environments, and argumentation and modelling in science education. This volume includes edited versions of 37 outstanding papers presented during the conference, including the lectures of the keynote speakers. They have been selected for their quality, variety and interest, and present a good overview of the field of science education research.
Contextualisms in Epistemology
This comprehensive anthology collects twenty original essays and critical commentaries on different aspects of contextualism, written by leading philosophers on the topic. The editors’ introduction sketches the historical development of the contextualist movement and provides a survey and analysis of its arguments and major positions. The papers explore, inter alia, the central problems and prospects of semantic (or conversational) contextualism and its main alternative approaches such as inferential (or issue) contextualism, epistemic contextualism, and virtue contextualism. They also investigate the connections between contextualism and epistemic particularism, and between contextualism and stability accounts of knowledge.
Contemporary Sociological Theory : An Integrated Multi-Level Approach
This book covers the major theoretical orientations that have been influential in American sociology since the mid-twentieth century. These include symbolic interaction, phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology, social exchange and rational choice theories, sociology of emotions, functionalism and neofunctionalism, conflict and critical theory, selected feminist theories, structuration theory, systems theory, sociobiology, selected sociology of culture perspectives, and major themes from postmodern orientations.
Contemporary Reflections on Business Ethics
Ronald F. Duska, who began his career as a philosopher, has, over the last 30 years, established himself as one of the leading scholars in the field of business ethics. In the past decade, he has concentrated on ethics in the financial services industry because of his affiliation with The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, an institution that specializes in educating financial services professionals. This affiliation gives Duska regular interaction with producers, managers, and top executives in the financial services industry. This book includes a selection of the articles Duska has written throughout the years on ethics, business ethics, teaching ethics, agency theory, postmodernism, employee rights, and ethics in accounting and the financial services industry. The articles reflect Duska’s underlying philosophical concerns and their application to the real-world challenges of practitioners—an overarching method that might be called an Aristotelian common-sense approach to ethical decision making.
Contemporary Qualitative Research : Exemplars for Science and Mathematics Educators
This volume offers a unique set of research exemplars for science, mathematics and technology educators. The volume explores the important challenge of how to translate leading-edge methodologies into practical research strategies and techniques. The book is divided into three major sections, The Golden Age of Research, Meeting the Research Crises and A New Era of Research, with chapters exploring a variety of methodologies and representational forms and texts. These include historical, narrative, literary, phenomenological, autobiographical, virtual and performance texts, among others. Qualitative Research in Postmodern Times is an exciting and accessible book that will be essential reading for science, mathematics and technology educators interested in new forms of educational research. Beginning researchers will find it practically helpful in planning and conducting their research studies, while experienced researchers will welcome new theoretical insights into postmodern methodologies.
Contemporary Housing Struggles : A Structural Field of Contention Approach
This book provides a comparative study of housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest in 2008-2021. The financialization of housing and the resulting inequalities, expulsions and social contention are a central characteristic of today’s capitalist crisis. These two East European cities that fall outside the usual focus of urban movements research provide an illuminating case of similar structural conditions governed by different political constellations at the national and local scales. Instead of searching for unilinear narratives connecting structural tensions to politicized claims, the book offers an in-depth contextual analysis of multiple forms of contention, their (often unintentional) interactions, and their broader political-structural background, including tensions surrounded by political silence.
Contemporary family lifestyles in Central and Western Europe : Selected cases
This introductory chapter approaches two basic categories of the whole monography which is a family and a lifestyle. The first subchapter deals with the complexity around the definition of the term family nowadays and difficulties with its definition.
Consumer perception of product risks and benefits
Reflects the current thinking and research on how consumers’ perception of product risks and benefits affects their behavior. It provides the scientific, regulatory and industrial research community with a conceptual and methodological reference point for studies on consumer behavior and marketing. The contributions address various aspects of consumer psychology and behavior, risk perception and communication, marketing research strategies, as well as consumer product regulation. The book is divided into 4 parts: Product risks; Perception of product risks and benefits; Consumer behavior; Regulation and responsibility.
Constructive Negations and Paraconsistency
This book presents the author’s recent investigations of the two main concepts of negation developed in the constructive logic: the negation as reduction to absurdity (L.E.J. Brouwer) and the strong negation (D. Nelson) are studied in the setting of paraconsistent logic. The paraconsistent logics are those, which admit inconsistent but non-trivial theories, i.e., the logics which allow making inferences in non-trivial fashion from an inconsistent set of hypotheses. The study is based on algebraic methods, demonstrates the remarkable regularity and the similarity of structures of both lattices of logics, and gives essential information on the paraconsistent nature of logics Lj and N4.The methods developed in this book can be applied for investigation of other classes of paraconsistent logics.



















