Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer International Publishing

This book provides an update on the latest development in the field of microRNAs in cancer research with an emphasis on translational research. Since the early 2000s, microRNAs have been recognized as important and ubiquitous regulators of gene expression. Soon it became evident that their deregulation can cause human diseases including cancer. This book focuses on the emerging opportunities for the application of microRNA research in clinical practice. In this context, computer models are presented that can help to identify novel biomarkers, e.g. in circulating microRNAs, and tools that can help to design microRNA-based therapeutic interventions. Other chapters evaluate the role of microRNAs in immunotherapy, immune responses and drug resistance.Covering key topics on microRNAs in cancer research this book is a valuable resource for both emerging and established microRNA researchers who want to explore the potential of microRNAs as therapeutic targets or co-adjuvants in cancer therapies.

This book on 'Secondary Agriculture' discusses the goal of doubling farmers' incomes. The term 'secondary' has a bearing on climate change adaptation and its mitigation, small farm viability and profitability, food security, nutrition, sustainable utilization of natural resources, and optimal usage of produce from primary agriculture and farm incomes. Promoting secondary agriculture has implications on attaining sustainable development goals, which aim to connect primary, secondary and tertiary sectors by using slack/idle factors of production, such as land and labour, contributing to primary agriculture production, capturing 'value' in primary agricultural activities, and generating additional income at the enterprise level. In context to same, the chapters of this book have been designed to promote secondary agriculture through low-cost skills and technology applications in agriculture and by upscaling knowledge via integrating primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of agriculture. The motivation behind this book is to address the challenges of biotic and abiotic stresses facing the farming community; to increase farmers income through low-cost skills and technology applications in agriculture; to upscale knowledge by integrating primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of agriculture.   The food processing sector in India is still in a nascent stage with only 8 per cent of the produce being processed as against 80-98 per cent in case of high-income countries (Government of India, 2008, 2010). The food processing sector is now receiving the boost with the annual growth of 13.2 per cent in registered food processing units during 2004-10 (Government of India, 2011). Against this backdrop, there is a strong need to strategically handle the situation in order to facilitate a self-sustainable and long-run growth of the sector, which is felt possible by focusing on Secondary Agriculture. Though not a panacea for all ailments of the primary sector, but it can definitely drive the growth.

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories.

This book brings together a selection of papers by George Gerstein, representing his long-term endeavor of making neuroscience into a more rigorous science inspired by physics, where he had his roots. Professor Gerstein was many years ahead of the field, consistently striving for quantitative analyses, mechanistic models, and conceptual clarity.  In doing so, he pioneered Computational Neuroscience, many years before the term itself was born.  The overarching goal of George Gerstein's research was to understand the functional organization of neuronal networks in the brain. The editors of this book have compiled a selection of George Gerstein's many seminal contributions to neuroscience--be they experimental, theoretical or computational--into a single, comprehensive volume .The aim is to provide readers with a fresh introduction of these various concepts in the original literature.  The volume is organized  in a series of chapters by subject, ordered in time, each one containing one or more of George Gerstein's papers.

This book proposes a radical change in communication strategies about environmental problems, advocating for more active and emotionally engaging methods that drive people to action. Based on new theoretical developments and research, the book provides a new framework for designing such communication strategies and suggests practical implementations of these ideas for practitioners, policy-makers, and scientists.Among the topics discussed:  The psychology of change and why disruptive communication is necessary Virtual reality technologies used to communicate complex ideas Reflections on the value of science fiction and climate fiction in addressing environmental issues Analyzing the impact of youth climate activismDisruptive Environmental Communication provides an innovative new framework for designing effective communication strategies to address large-scale environmental problems, challenging the assumption that environmental problems can be communicated and handled through non-disruptive methods.

This volume represents a comprehensive state-of-the-art picture of family business and entrepreneurship issues in countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council.  It provides major theoretical and empirical evidence which depicts the current processes in each GCC country including problems, faced by family business owners and entrepreneurs, such as succession, financial constraints, and conflicts. The chapters offer recommendations to policy makers on how to improve the general business environment and encourage potential investors, researchers, academicians, and professionals to be more involved in the region. The book is an outcome of a long-lasting endeavor and includes contributions from highly reputed authors and experts from the region and abroad.

This book traces raciolinguistic ideologies in England's schools, focusing on post- 2010 policy reforms which frame the language practices of low-income, racialised speakers as limited and deficient. Across interviews, policy mechanisms and classroom observations, the author shows how raciolinguistic ideologies are rooted in British colonial logics which continue to shape contemporary education policy. He shows how these policies require marginalised speakers to modify their speech patterns in line with normative standards of whiteness under new guises of social justice and research robustness. Finally, new visions for language education and linguistic justice are offered, demonstrating how teachers can see themselves as language activists to identify, resist and reject faults in a hostile and oppressive policy architecture. This book draws on fields including critical language policy, educational sociolinguistics, genealogy, raciolinguistics and critical language awareness.

This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of UK African Diaspora health seekers and their sustained health inequalities in the health market. It translates their often-silenced voices into a decolonial praxis, where their experiences illuminate the hidden factors that have blighted change in health outcomes for these communities. The book excavates and breaks down the nature of these hidden factors, as historical patterns of behaviour that comprise whiteness over the longue duree. Using the lenses of decolonial and critical race studies, the book places whiteness within an ethical and moral framework in order to examine the hidden factors behind health inequalities.  The book also looks at intersectionality and discusses whether it is actually fit for purpose as an analytical framework for discussing the health seeking behaviours of both Black men and Black women in relation to their unequal access to the health market.

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies toachieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

This book presents explainability in edge AI, an amalgamation of edge computing and AI. The issues of transparency, fairness, accountability, explainability, interpretability, data-fusion, and comprehensibility that are significant for edge AI are being addressed in this book through explainable models and techniques. The concept of explainable edge AI is new in front of the academic and research community, and consequently, it will undoubtedly explore multiple research dimensions. The book presents the concept of explainability in edge AI which is the amalgamation of edge computing and AI. In the futuristic computing scenario, the goal of explainable edge AI will be to execute the AI tasks and produce explainable results at the edge. First, this book explains the fundamental concepts of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), then it describes the concept of explainable edge AI, and finally, it elaborates on the technicalities of explainability in edge AI. Owing to the quick transition in the current computing scenario and integration with the latest AI-based technologies, it is significant to facilitate people-centric computing through explainable edge AI. Explainable edge AI will facilitate enhanced prediction accuracy with the comprehensible decision and traceability of actions performed at the edge and have a significant impact on futuristic computing scenarios. This book is highly relevant to graduate/postgraduate students, academicians, researchers, engineers, professionals, and other personnel working in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and intelligent systems.

This book presents contributions to the 50th Annual Conference of the Operations Research Society of South Africa (ORSSA), which was jointly hosted with the African Federation of Operations Research Societies (AFROS) at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa from 12 to 15 September, 2021. Focusing on innovative case studies and recent applications of Operations Research models and algorithms in African countries, each chapter highlights findings emerging from the countries in question and explains the lessons learned. As such, the book offers an up-to-date overview of Operations Research practices and developments in Africa. AFROS is a "e;not for profit"e; organization that aims to promote Operations Research in Africa. Its affairs are regulated by an Executive Committee consisting of representatives/alternates of all its member societies. The members of the Federation undertake to co-operate in the advancement of knowledge, interest and education in Operations Research by appropriate means, particularly the exchange of information, the holding of meetings and conferences, and the awarding of prizes.

This book develops integral identities, mostly involving multidimensional functions and infinite limits of integration, whose evaluations are intractable by common means. It exposes a methodology based on the multivariate power substitution and its variants, assisted by the software tool Mathematica. The approaches introduced comprise the generalized method of exhaustion, the multivariate power substitution and its variants, and the use of permutation symmetry to evaluate definite integrals, which are very important both in their own right, and as necessary intermediate steps towards more involved computation.A key tenet is that such approaches work best when applied to integrals having certain characteristics as a starting point. Most integrals, if used as a starting point, will lead to no result at all, or will lead to a known result. However, there is a special class of integrals (i.e., innovative integrals) which, if used as a starting point for such approaches, will lead to new and useful results, and can also enable the reader to generate many other new results that are not in the book.The reader will find a myriad of novel approaches for evaluating integrals, with a focus on tools such as Mathematica as a means of obtaining useful results, and also checking whether they are already known. Results presented involve the gamma function, the hypergeometric functions, the complementary error function, the exponential integral function, the Riemann zeta function, and others that will be introduced as they arise. The book concludes with selected engineering applications, e.g., involving wave propagation, antenna theory, non-Gaussian and weighted Gaussian distributions, and other areas.The intended audience comprises junior and senior sciences majors planning to continue in the pure and applied sciences at the graduate level, graduate students in mathematics and the sciences, and junior and established researchers in mathematical physics, engineering, and mathematics. Indeed, the pedagogical inclination of the exposition will have students work out, understand, and efficiently use multidimensional integrals from first principles.

This volume highlights the potentials as well as the limits and challenges of human breath analysis and describes the current efforts made to advance this promising technology from bench to bed. Human breath analysis is a young, interdisciplinary and innovative research field aiming to provide a smart and non-invasive diagnostic tool, which can be used for screening, detecting and monitoring of diseases or metabolic disorders. This book presents different approaches for breath analysis including real-time and offline mass spectrometry as well as optical and semiconductor gas sensing methods. Besides, the role of smart algorithms to improve the performance of those technologies and the importance of pulmonary function diagnostics for more reliable and meaningful breath analysis are highlighted. Finally, current application scenarios and future perspectives of breath analysis and pulmonary functioning tests are addressed.The volume is useful for researchers, who are new in the field, to easily get an overview of the current status and the challenges present in human breath analysis. Topics from fundamental research over targeted sensor development and application scenarios are described. Thus, this volume covers all development stages providing support and inspiration for engineers, medical doctors and scientists from various fields.

Studies on South Asia are an emerging interdisciplinary field, this volume expands on the currently limited literature available on South Asia and focuses on the regions environmental, climatic and natural resource base by looking at case studies from Nepal, India and Bangladesh. The book contains twelve chapters which deal with various environmental challenges, such as the impacts of climate change on floods and droughts, population structure and regeneration dynamics of dominant  treeline species, environmental changes and rural livelihoods, and change analysis and impacts of hard coastal structures. Apart from the various thematic areas and diversity of geographical coverage, most of the studies also demonstrate the application of geospatial techniques for the collection of environmental data, and the use of GIS for spatial analysis of the data. The specific application of geospatial techniques and methods includes NDVI, NDWI, NDBI, SMI, SPOT-VGT NDVI, environmental flow, distribution and trend estimation of tropospheric formaldehyde, vegetation sensitivity to climate change, variability of tropospheric  ozone, and geo-environmental problems.The contributors are seasoned researchers currently engaged in  academic and research activities, and work at universities  in USA, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Japan.

This book introduces a variety of well-proven and newly developed nature-inspired optimization algorithms solving a wide range of real-life biomedical and healthcare problems. Few solo and hybrid approaches are demonstrated in a lucid manner for the effective integration and finding solution for a large-scale complex healthcare problem. In the present bigdata-based computing scenario, nature-inspired optimization techniques present adaptive mechanisms that permit the understanding of complex data and altering environments. This book is a voluminous collection for the confront faced by the healthcare institutions and hospitals for practical analysis, storage, and data analysis. It explores the distinct nature-inspired optimization-based approaches that are able to handle more accurate outcomes for the current biomedical and healthcare problems. In addition to providing a state-of-the-art and advanced intelligent methods, it also enlightens an insight for solving diversified healthcare problems such as cancer and diabetes.

Written by the leading experts of this field, this book results from the International Symposium on "e;Single Molecule Machines on a Surface: Gears, Train of Gears, Motors, and Cars"e; which took place in Toulouse, France on November 24th - 25th, 2021. The different chapters focus on describing the use of single molecule mechanics on a surface and analyze the different steps leading to the design of a single molecule nanocar. The authors present how a single molecule is rotating, how a single molecule gear can participate to a train of molecule gears to propagate motion and how this knowledge is used for the design of nanocars. The way energy is provided to a single molecule and how this energy drives it onto the surface is also analyzed. A large portion of this volume is written by the eight teams selected to participate in the Nanocar Race II event. This book is of great use to graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers who are interested in single molecule mechanics and who want to know more about the fundamentals and applications of this new research field. 

This book presents the latest findings and ongoing research in the field of green information systems as well as green information and communication technology (ICT). It provides insights into a whole range of cross-cutting concerns in ICT and environmental sciences and showcases how information and communication technologies allow environmental and energy efficiency issues to be handled effectively. Offering a selection of extended and reworked contributions to the 30th International Conference EnviroInfo 2016, it is essential reading for anyone wanting to extend their expertise in the area. 

This book focuses on nanomaterials with antibacterial properties. Antibacterial resistance is a growing concern that poses a serious threat to public health worldwide. This book looks at the fabrication, material's properties, and characterization of a range of metallic, bimetallic, and metal-oxide-based nanomaterials that can be exploited for their antimicrobial properties. A key focus of this book is its emphasis on 'green' synthesis of nanomaterials, as many conventional routes of nanomaterial fabrication do not fulfill key sustainability criteria in terms of their toxicity and lack of eco-friendliness. Additionally, this book introduces the application of nanoparticles to veterinary medicine. Given the ever-increasing global livestock population coupled with the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens of animal origin (bacterial, parasitic, and hemoprotozoa), the use of nanoparticles as antibacterial agents represents a paradigm shift in every aspect of veterinary care. Authored by scholars with combined expertise in nanomaterials and veterinary medicine, this book provides valuable information for researchers working on sustainable nanomaterials with antibacterial properties.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the Calculus of Variations and its use in modelling mechanics and physics problems. Presenting a geometric approach to the subject, it progressively guides the reader through this very active branch of mathematics, accompanying key statements with a huge variety of exercises, some of them solved. Stressing the need to overcome limitations of the initial point of view, and emphasising the interconnectivity of various branches of mathematics (algebra, analysis and geometry), the book includes some advanced material to challenge the most motivated students. Systematic, short historical notes provide details on the subject's odyssey, and how new tools have been developed over the last two centuries. This English translation updates a set of notes for a course first given at the Ecole polytechnique in 1987. It will be accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Introducing the institutional logics perspective to street-level analysis, this book examines how street-level workers deal with the institutional logics that guide their organization - whether they follow or challenge them. While doing so, the book develops a theoretical framework to study street-level workers' institutional agency within organizations from different institutional backgrounds. The book conceptualizes street-level workers as institutional entrepreneurs and presents an original process model to capture deinstitutionalization efforts in street-level discourse. This ordinal model accounts for embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship as well as for more gradual moves towards deinstitutionalization through the hybridization of institutional logics. The author tests the model empirically using interview data and discusses how street-level workers diverge from the institutional logic of their organization in almost two thirds of their statements, indicating a tendency towards institutional entrepreneurship. The book finally combines two literature strands: institutionalism and implementation research, showing how street-level workers may be perceived as institutional entrepreneurs.This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science, public policy, public administration, and organizational studies, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, street work, and the institutional logics perspective. 

The book provides a characteristic of sulfate karst, the features of its distribution and development in the Perm region, based on their own research and generalization of data accumulated in recent years. An updated zoning of the territory is given, partly based on the use of GIS technologies. This book also offers a detailed description of areas with characteristics of geological and hydrogeological conditions for the development of karst and karst phenomena. Besides, it also provides a detailed description of a number of caves, information about specially protected natural areas associated with sulfate karst and new unique objects that need protection. The book describes the influence of karst on economic activity and the ecological situation.The publication is intended for geologists, geographers, ecologists, karst scientists, speleologists, local historians, teachers and students of specialties related to earth sciences, as well as a wide range of karst and cave enthusiasts.

This book explores the political economy of governance in Palestine. It makes a unique contribution to studies of governance and political economy using the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a case study, introducing and developing the concept of 'dual rentierism'. The author uses primary research to chart the evolution of the fiscal sociology of the PA and explore how it has shaped the PA's economic policies and the state-society relationship in the Palestinian Territories. The book adopts a critical political economy approach, making the case that external sources of PA income represent political rents that need to be disaggregated and studied concurrently. It further focuses on the drivers and constraints that have shaped the PA's policy development and state-building associated with its dependence on external revenues. Ultimately, the book elaborates on how the need for fiscal survivability has thwarted the Palestinian quest for statehood. 

This book is a response to the felt need of social work practitioners for professional supervision. Reflecting on the social work profession in the context of contemporary socio-economic and political challenges and wide-ranging organizational and practice settings, the book provides a voice for supervisors to share their experiences. Social workers often deal with difficult, undefined and unique human situations where there are no ready-made solutions or quick fixes. This constant and complex working process can cause stress, burnout and affect their quality of work and judgement if they are not supported appropriately and in a timely way. One such support to them is offering professional supervision to enhance their professional functioning and their quality of service. On the one hand, the narratives of experienced supervisors reveal critical dilemmas, core processes and content, expectations, issues posed, and concepts and theories employed in professional supervision, and on the other, the wisdom and qualities of supervisors. This book analyzes concepts and models employed by supervisors and the complex interaction of their qualities and wisdom that arise from their narratives. It underscores the supervisee's being through integrating the personal and professional self to deliver better quality services to people, agencies, and communities. The book argues that the current trends compel action for well thought through professional supervision for all who need it. Those interested in professional supervision - supervisees, practitioners, and supervisors - will benefit from reading this book. Enlightening Professional Supervision in Social Work: Voices and Virtues of Supervisors is the resource that both supervisors and practitioners need to create safe environments to carefully reflect, develop knowledge, sharpen skills and effectively engage in practice. It will improve services to clients and organizational service provision, and not only benefit both practitioners and supervisors in social work and human services, but also social work educators and students, social policy administrators as well as managers and trainers in the social services sector.