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Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume contains a selection of scientific papers related to the structure and dynamics of non-rigid molecules. This frontline topic was born a few decades ago, when Longuet-Higgins proposed his famous theory of Molecular Symmetry Groups (Mol. Phys. 6, (1962) 457). Unfortunately, since this early paper, very few publications have been devoted to the study of non-rigid molecules. Let us mention some books which dedicate some chapters to them: Induced Representations in Crystals and Molecules, by S. L. Altmann, Academic Publishers, 1977; Molecular Symmetry and Spectroscopy, by P. R. Bunker, Academic Publishers, 1979; and finally Large Amplitude Motion in Molecules, Vols. I and II, by several authors, Springer Verlag, 1979. More recently an International Symposium on Non-Rigid Molecules was held in Paris, France, from 1-7 July 1982, the proceedings of which were published in the volume entitled Symmetries and Properties of Non-Rigid Molecules. A Comprehensive Survey, edited by J. Maruani et al., Elsevier, 1983. Finally, we should mention the very specialized work The Permutational Approach to Dynamic Stereochemistry, by J. Brocas et al., McGraw-Hill, 1983. The purpose of this book is to fill in this information on the structure and dynamics of non-rigid systems. To this aim, we have gathered a collection of recent papers written by the most qualified specialists in the world, covering a large field from van der Waals molecules to inorganic complexes and organic polyrotor molecules, as well as considering statistical and dynamic aspects.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume of essays grew out of a symposium organized by Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring for the 1974 American Anthropological Association meetings in Mexico City. The two-part symposium was enti tled 'Women in Ritual and Symbolic Systems: I. Midwives, Madonnas, and Mediums; ll. Prostitutes, Witches, and Androgynes. ' The sym posium participants were asked to explore theological, ritual, and sym bolic aspects-both positive and negative-of the feminine cultural do main, using ethnographic materials with which they were familiar. The resulting papers have been revised, edited, and gathered together in Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles. The theoretical importance of these papers for the study of women's participation in culture and society rests on the assumption that reli gious ideas are paramount forces in social life, that relationships be tween the sexes, the nature of female sexuality, and the social and cul tural roles of women are in large part defined by religious ideas. That this proposition remains valid long after religion itself has ceased to be a living truth in the lives of many people can be seen from the tenacious ness of Judeo-Christian ideas about women in the contemporary West ern world. Both the expansion of life options for women and the creation of more positive cultural images of the female are intimately related to changes in the my tho-symbolic portraits that people carry around in their heads. These portraits are almost exclusively constructed from mythological and religious conceptions inherent in all facets of culture.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This book contains the collected papers presented at the Inter national Symposium on Polymers in Medicine, Biomedical and Pharma cological Applications, which was held at Porto Cervo, Italy, May 24-28, 1982. To the best of our knowledge, this symposium was the first to be organized in Italy entirely devoted to the several aspects of the use of synthetic and semisynthetic macromolecular materials in the field of biomedical and pharmacological applications. The inten~ tion of the Organizing Committee of the symposium was the promotion of a scientific and cultural initiative to gain the attention of various experts in line research of the potential of suitably de signed 'man-made' polymeric materials in biomedical applications. With highly qualified and worldwide attendance, the above goal was fully satisfied. Indeed the opportunity of meeting to gether in a well conceived and discreet corner of the world, scien tists with different cultural backgrounds and objectives helped ex tend the meaning of the symposium far beyond the Italian borders and the perspectives of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) , the major sponsor of the meeting.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Despite an enormous investment of effort throughout the world, cancer is still a major barrier to human longevity. Cancer deaths are estimated to be more than five million globally. Currently responsible for about 20% of all deaths in developed coun tries, the burden of cancer is steadily increasing in the developing world, following the control of malnutrition and infectious and parasitic diseases. Deeply impressed by the report of the Symposium on Geographic Pathology and Demography of Cancer held at Oxford in 1950, and through his preliminary work on cancer mortality statistics in Japan, Professor M. Segi decided to devote his life to the fight against cancer by establishing worldwide comparative cancer statistics-one of the landmarks in cancer studies and in cancer prevention strategies. He and his associates published six volumes of Cancer Mortality in 24 Countries with reliable mortality statistics covering 1950-1967, using the world population which he had derived as a standard. These publications rapidly became standard works of reference on the subject throughout the world. Professor Segi was a pioneer of cancer epidemiology in Japan. He cleaved a path through the jungle of cancer using epidemiological methods. By promoting cancer studies, he overcame the poor understanding of malignant disease which existed after World War II, when cancer mortality rates were still low.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In this cutting-edge text, Trish Reid offers a concise overview of the shifting roles of theatre and theatricality in Scottish culture. She asks important questions about the relationship between Scottish theatre, history and identity, and celebrates the recent emergence of a generation of internationally successful Scottish playwrights.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Due to measurement errors, transmission lost, or injected noise for privacy protection, uncertainty exists in the data of many real applications. However, query processing techniques for deterministic data cannot be directly applied to uncertain data because they do not have mechanisms to handle data uncertainty. Therefore, efficient and effective manipulation of uncertain data is a practical yet challenging research topic. In this book, we start from the data models for imprecise and uncertain data, move on to defining different semantics for queries on uncertain data, and finally discuss the advanced query processing techniques for various probabilistic queries in uncertain databases. The book serves as a comprehensive guideline for query processing over uncertain databases. Table of Contents: Introduction / Uncertain Data Models / Spatial Query Semantics over Uncertain Data Models / Spatial Query Processing over Uncertain Databases / ConclusionSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 104 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -After the traditional document-centric Web 1.0 and user-generated content focused Web 2.0, Web 3.0 has become a repository of an ever growing variety of Web resources that include data and services associated with enterprises, social networks, sensors, cloud, as well as mobile and other devices that constitute the Internet of Things. These pose unprecedented challenges in terms of heterogeneity (variety), scale (volume), and continuous changes (velocity), as well as present corresponding opportunities if they can be exploited. Just as semantics has played a critical role in dealing with data heterogeneity in the past to provide interoperability and integration, it is playing an even more critical role in dealing with the challenges and helping users and applications exploit all forms of Web 3.0 data. This book presents a unified approach to harness and exploit all forms of contemporary Web resources using the core principles of ability to associate meaning with data through conceptualor domain models and semantic descriptions including annotations, and through advanced semantic techniques for search, integration, and analysis. It discusses the use of Semantic Web standards and techniques when appropriate, but also advocates the use of lighter weight, easier to use, and more scalable options when they are more suitable. The authors' extensive experience spanning research and prototypes to development of operational applications and commercial technologies and products guide the treatment of the material. Table of Contents: Role of Semantics and Metadata / Types and Models of Semantics / Annotation -- Adding Semantics to Data / Semantics for Enterprise Data / Semantics for Services / Semantics for Sensor Data / Semantics for Social Data / Semantics for Cloud Computing / Semantics for Advanced ApplicationsSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 176 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The field of narrative (or story) understanding and generation is one of the oldest in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), which is hardly surprising, since storytelling is such a fundamental and familiar intellectual and social activity. In recent years, the demands of interactive entertainment and interest in the creation of engaging narratives with life-like characters have provided a fresh impetus to this field. This book provides an overview of the principal problems, approaches, and challenges faced today in modeling the narrative structure of stories. The book introduces classical narratological concepts from literary theory and their mapping to computational approaches. It demonstrates how research in AI and NLP has modeled character goals, causality, and time using formalisms from planning, case-based reasoning, and temporal reasoning, and discusses fundamental limitations in such approaches. It proposes new representations for embedded narratives and fictional entities, for assessing the pace of a narrative, and offers an empirical theory of audience response. These notions are incorporated into an annotation scheme called NarrativeML. The book identifies key issues that need to be addressed, including annotation methods for long literary narratives, the representation of modality and habituality, and characterizing the goals of narrators. It also suggests a future characterized by advanced text mining of narrative structure from large-scale corpora and the development of a variety of useful authoring aids. This is the first book to provide a systematic foundation that integrates together narratology, AI, and computational linguistics. It can serve as a narratology primer for computer scientists and an elucidation of computational narratology for literary theorists. It is written in a highly accessible manner and is intended for use by a broad scientific audience that includes linguists (computational and formal semanticists), AI researchers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, game developers, and narrative theorists. Table of Contents: List of Figures / List of Tables / Narratological Background / Characters as Intentional Agents / Time / Plot / Summary and Future DirectionsSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 144 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The motivation for developing this synthesis lecture was to provide a tutorial on queuing and trunking, with extensions to networks of queues, suitable for supplementing courses in communications, stochastic processes, and networking. An essential component of this lecture is MATLAB-based demonstrations and exercises, which can be easily modified to enable the student to observe and evaluate the impact of changing parameters, arrival and departure statistics, queuing disciplines, the number of servers, and other important aspects of the underlying system model. Much of the work in this lecture is based on Poisson statistics, since Poisson models are useful due to the fact that Poisson models are analytically tractable and provide a useful approximation for many applications. We recognize that the validity of Poisson statistics is questionable for a number of networking applications and therefore we briefly discuss self-similar models and the Hurst parameter, long-term dependent models, the Pareto distribution, and other related topics. Appropriate references are given for continued study on these topics.The initial chapters of this book consider individual queues in isolation. The systems studied consist of an arrival process, a single queue with a particular queuing discipline, and one or more servers. While this allows us to study the basic concepts of queuing and trunking, modern data networks consist of many queues that interact in complex ways. While many of these interactions defy analysis, the final chapter introduces a model of a network of queues in which, after being served in one queue, customers may join another queue. The key result for this model is known as Jackson's Theorem. Finally, we state the BCMP Theorem, which can be viewed as a further extension of Jackson's Theorem and present Kleinrock's formula, which can be viewed as the network versionof Little's Theorem.Table of Contents: Introduction / Poisson, Erlang, and Pareto Distributions / A Brief Introduction to Queueing Theory / Blocking and Delay / Networks of QueuesSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 108 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Cloud computing has emerged as a successful paradigm of service-oriented computing and has revolutionized the way computing infrastructure is used. This success has seen a proliferation in the number of applications that are being deployed in various cloud platforms. There has also been an increase in the scale of the data generated as well as consumed by such applications. Scalable database management systems form a critical part of the cloud infrastructure. The attempt to address the challenges posed by the management of big data has led to a plethora of systems. This book aims to clarify some of the important concepts in the design space of scalable data management in cloud computing infrastructures. Some of the questions that this book aims to answer are: the appropriate systems for a specific set of application requirements, the research challenges in data management for the cloud, and what is novel in the cloud for database researchers We also aim to address one basic question:whether cloud computing poses new challenges in scalable data management or it is just a reincarnation of old problems We provide a comprehensive background study of state-of-the-art systems for scalable data management and analysis. We also identify important aspects in the design of different systems and the applicability and scope of these systems. A thorough understanding of current solutions and a precise characterization of the design space are essential for clearing the 'cloudy skies of data management' and ensuring the success of DBMSs in the cloud, thus emulating the success enjoyed by relational databases in traditional enterprise settings. Table of Contents: Introduction / Distributed Data Management / Cloud Data Management: Early Trends / Transactions on Co-located Data / Transactions on Distributed Data / Multi-tenant Database Systems / Concluding RemarksSpringer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 140 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Kunita, H.:Stochastic differential equations and stochastic flows of diffeomorphisms.-Elworthy, D.: Geometric aspects of diffusions on manifolds.-Ancona, A.:Théorie du potential sur les graphs et les variétiés.-Emery, M.:Continuous martingales in differentiable manifolds. ¿Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 516 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This monograph derives direct and concrete relations between colored Jones polynomials and the topology of incompressible spanning surfaces in knot and link complements. Under mild diagrammatic hypotheses, we prove that the growth of the degree of the colored Jones polynomials is a boundary slope of an essential surface in the knot complement. We show that certain coefficients of the polynomial measure how far this surface is from being a fiber for the knot; in particular, the surface is a fiber if and only if a particular coefficient vanishes. We also relate hyperbolic volume to colored Jones polynomials.Our method is to generalize the checkerboard decompositions of alternating knots. Under mild diagrammatic hypotheses, we show that these surfaces are essential, and obtain an ideal polyhedral decomposition of their complement. We use normal surface theory to relate the pieces of the JSJ decomposition of the complement to the combinatorics of certain surface spines (state graphs). Since state graphs have previously appeared in the study of Jones polynomials, our method bridges the gap between quantum and geometric knot invariants.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 184 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Paul Verhoeven's 1992 thriller Basic Instinct - starring Michael Douglas as a police detective and Sharon Stone as the femme fatale Catherine Tramell - was one of the first mainstream 'erotic thrillers', a film which shifted the boundaries for graphic representations of sex in Hollywood cinema. It remains a significant milestone in film censorship and controversy. In his fascinating study, the first in-depth account of the film, Stevie Simkin explores the unrest and protest that Basic Instinct sparked in the gay, lesbian and feminist communities in the US, incensed by what they saw as the script's homophobia and misogyny.Simkin considers the social and cultural context in which Basic Instinct was made, examining the film's troubled production history, the battles with censors, and its reception. He offers a number of readings of the movie, looking at its representation of bisexuality and the depiction of a 'transgressive' female protagonist. He also focuses on key sequences, including the infamous interrogation scene, and details the cuts demanded by the censors, resulting in different UK and US versions. In conclusion, Simkin considers the legacy of Basic Instinct, and its enduring effect on media representations of the violent woman.STEVIE SIMKIN is Reader in Drama and Film at the University of Winchester, UK. His publications include work on cult television, popular music, and Renaissance drama. He is the author of, amongst other works, A Preface to Marlowe (1999), Revenge Tragedy: A New Casebook (2001), Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence (2005), and, also in the Controversies series, a book on the Peckinpah film, Straw Dogs.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Focusing on the Asia-Pacific region, which in recent years has been the engine of global economic growth , this volume surveys trends and prospects in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) with particular reference to achieving inclusive growth and the greening of economies. Underlying the increasing pressure for new models of TVET provision is the rapid pace of technological change, demand for a work force which is highly responsive to evolving needs and a transforming market place that calls for higher order skills and lifelong learning. The book proposes a re-engineered, modernized TVET system that fosters an innovative approach which enhances the employability of workers as well as the sustainability of their livelihoods. The book includes contributions from leading policy makers, researchers, and practitioners, including those in the private sector in analyzing and forecasting the most urgent priorities in skills development. The book argues for creative approaches to TVET design and delivery particularly with a view to improve job prospects , and meeting the goals of inclusion, sustainable development and social cohesion. Addressing issues such as the chronic mismatches between skills acquired and actual skills required in the work place, the volume proposes diversified approaches towards workforce development and partnerships with the private sector to improve the quality and relevance of skills development . The new imperatives created by ¿greening¿ economies and responses required in skills development and training are addressed. Developing TVET is a high priority for governments in the Asia Pacific region as they seek to achieve long-term sustainable growth since the .continued success of their economic destinies depend on it. The volume also includes an emerging framework for skills development for inclusive and sustainable growth in the Asia and Pacific region.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 400 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Dieter Senghaas, professor emeritus of international relations, University of Bremen, was one of most innovative contemporary German social scientists, with major contributions on peace and development research and on music and peace. He was awarded many prizes: the International Peace Research Award (1987), Göttingen Peace Prize (1999), Culture and Peace Prize of the Villa Ichon in Bremen (2006), and the Leopold-Kohr Prize of the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research (2010). In addition to his autobiographic notes and his selected bibliography, this book offers a global audience five key texts by D. Senghaas (1974-2009): Towards an Analysis of Threat Policy in International Relations; Friedrich List and the Basic Problems of Development; Developing the Definitions of Perpetual Peace (¿para pacem¿): Through What and How is Peace Constituted Today ; Sounds of Peace: On Peace Fantasies and Peace Offerings in Classical Music; and Enhancing Human Rights ¿ A Contribution to Viable Peace.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 168 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -The structure of Italian industry is characterized by a predominance of small sized companies and the presence of very few large companies. For a long time a conviction was shared among scholars and practitioners that the strength and safety of Italian industry were based on its industrial districts, that is, the system of interdependent and co-localized small companies which derive their competitive force from an effective and efficient division of labour. This book stresses the idea that a new, vital and promising phenomenon for the competitiveness of Italian industry is focused on mid-sized companies, and the systems of interconnected firms that form a constituent part of their business model. These companies, which originate largely from districts and other local production systems, are a strong entrepreneurial force complementing the districts that have characterized Italy and made Italian industry famous worldwide. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of these firms is provided in this book. Business models and strategies implemented by a number of successful Italian mid-sized manufacturing companies are also explored. Consequences in terms of management and industrial policies are provided. A final look at the German Mittelstand gives a useful comparison.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 208 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -¿Energy efficiency contributes to the main objectives of energy policy in the European Union: energy security, cost effectiveness and environmental benefits. However, the efficiency potential remains widely untapped. Will White Certificate Instruments, a new framework instrument to foster end-use energy efficiency, help to close the energy efficiency gap The analysis compares the political process of choosing and designing White Certificate Instruments in Italy, France and Great Britain. The book shows that the type of policy instrument as well as its image has an influence not only on agenda-setting but also on the policy instrument¿s effectiveness due to interactions with existing energy efficiency discourses, regulatory traditions and the prevailing policy style.Springer VS in Springer Science + Business Media, Abraham-Lincoln-Straße 46, 65189 Wiesbaden 408 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -¿Based on a very extensive literature review the book delineates the previous scientific and practical applications of indices as benchmarks for single asset classes as stocks, commodities, German governmental bonds and cash as well as especially for multi asset portfolios. According to the specific influencing factors of the Eurozone a recommendation of allocating equity portfolios with respect to industrial or regional factors is given by an empirical analysis. As most common and significant benchmark index for the Eurozone, the Dow Jones Euro STOXX 50 is analysed according to index effects. This serves as comparison and consideration of the active anticipations of index membership exchanges and a simple index investment during short- and long-term periods. Furthermore a correlation weighted equity index, established by different TMI industry indices of the Eurozone is calculated, which serves as benefit for diversification opportunities of two multidimensionally diversified and systamatically allocated multi asset portfolios. These portfolios are composed with reference towards the Portfolio Selection Theory by Harry M. Markowitz to test its practical relevance and validity during the challenging years from 2001 and 2010.Springer Gabler in Springer Science + Business Media, Tiergartenstr. 15-17, 69121 Heidelberg 256 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -¿Co-creative meetings¿ foster invention and innovation, and therefore enable innovative developmental processes in an organizational and inter-organizational context, including strategy development, product development, human resource development, R&D, and trans-organizational projects.This book illustrates the difference between productive and innovative organizations and what that difference means for meetings taking place in such organizations, both from a conceptual and practical point of view.It provides managers, coaches, consultants and other professionals whose job it is to organize meetings with clear and action-oriented guidelines for the design of ¿co-creative meetings¿, and also shows how to incorporate them through experiential learning.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 120 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Almost every company wants to grow - at least officially. Shareholders are demanding further growth and no management team would deny that the growth of their company is one of the top issues they are working on every single day. However, there are barriers to growth, and these are not only external barriers. Most often it is not the economy, not the market and not the customer who just 'hasn't got it.' The main barriers can be discovered inside every company, because growth always comes from within. If the organization is not ready to grow, initiatives to increase market share, to enter new markets, and/or to increase profitability are destined to fail. This book systematically addresses the main internal barriers to growth and provides practical guidance not only for discovering these barriers, but to systematically overcoming them.¿Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 200 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This present report, as a second volume of the series entitled ¿Contemporary Logistics in China: an Introduction,¿ follows the same general conceptual organization, yet with updated analysis and discussion of logistics development, under the backdrop of the aftermath of the international financial crisis, the acceleration of the transformation of development mode and the strategic adjustment of the economic structure.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 216 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Counterfeit products represent a growing problem for a wide range of industries. There are many estimates of the size of this problem most of which coalesce around $500-billion annually on a global basis. Overall, a wide range of industries agree that there is a severe problem with the global protection of intellectual property rights (IPR), yet, there have been virtually no attempts to describe all aspects of the problem. This book aims at giving the most complete description of various characteristics of the intellectual property rights (IPR) environment in a global context. The authors believe a holistic understanding of the problem must include consumer complicity to purchase counterfeit, actions of the counterfeiters (pirates) as well as actions (or inaction) by home and host governments, and the role of international organizations and industry alliances. Only after establishing how all the actors in the IPR environment relate to one another can we describe global protection of the intellectual property rights environment and the managerial response of IPR owners and/or industry associations to combat this ongoing problem. The bookconcludes with pragmatic recommendations for protecting intellectual property given the recent trends discussed in the previous chapters, making it of interest to practitioners and policy-makers alike.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 248 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -Toward the late 1990s, several research groups independently began developing new, related theories in mathematical finance.These theories didaway with the standard stochastic geometric diffusion ¿Samuelson¿ market model (also known as the Black-Scholes model because it is used in that most famous theory), instead opting for models that allowed minimax approachesto complement or replace stochastic methods.Among the most fruitful models were those utilizing game-theoretic tools and the so-called interval market model. Over time, these models have slowly but steadily gained influence in the financial community, providing a useful alternative to classical methods.A self-contained monograph, The Interval Market Model in Mathematical Finance: Game-Theoretic Methodsassembles some of the most important results, old and new, in this area of research. Written by seven of the most prominent pioneers of the interval market model and game-theoretic finance, the work provides a detailed account of several closely relatedmodeling techniquesfor an array of problems in mathematical economics. The book isdivided into five parts, which successively address topics including: probability-free Black-Scholes theory; fair-price interval of an option; representation formulas and fast algorithms for option pricing; rainbow options; tychastic approach of mathematical finance based upon viability theory.This book providesa welcome addition to the literature, complementing myriad titles on the market that take a classical approach to mathematical finance. Itis a worthwhile resource for researchers in applied mathematics and quantitative finance,and has also beenwritten in a manneraccessible to financially-inclined readers with a limited technical background.Springer Basel AG in Springer Science + Business Media, Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin 364 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -China is dramatically catching up and is rapidly becoming a leading technological innovator on the global scale. The number of Chinese firms with global ambitions is growing fast, more and more technological innovation is coming from China, and the number of patents in China is also growing steadily. The negative side of this development is the still insufficient protection of intellectual property in China. The phenomenon of counterfeits originating from China has increased constantly over the past two decades. Moreover, within the past ten years the scale of intellectual property theft has risen exponentially in terms of its sophistication, volume, the range of goods, and the countries affected. This book addresses managers dealing with innovation in China, and offers concrete advice on how Western firms can benefit from these innovations. Among others, it provides examples and checklists to help decision-makers active in China.¿Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 140 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -,The papers in this collection, written by a cross-regional group of experts, provide insights into the causes of declining levels of citizen participation and other distinct forms of civic activism in Europe and explore a range of factors contributing to apathy and eventually disengagement from vital political processes and institutions. At the same time, this volume examines informal or unconventional types of civic engagement and political participation corresponding to the rapid advances in culture, technology and social networking. The volume is divided into three interrelated parts: Part I consists of critical essays in the form of theoretical approaches to analysing weakening political participation and citizen estrangement; Part II is dedicated to an exploration of the role and deployment of technologically advanced media, such as the internet, as determinants of changing patterns of political participationist behaviour. Finally, Part III presents findings of empirical research on the issue of political participation. Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, the book contributes towards a better understanding of the disquieting trend of voter apathy and disenchantment with politics in the context of the ongoing process of European integration, and offers a variety of analytical tools for decoding both the emergence of alternative conceptualizations of citizenship and other forms of meaningful civic and political engagement.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 304 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -On the occasion of the 80th birthday of Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a distinguished Mexican sociologist and professor emeritus of El Colegio de Mexico, Úrsula Oswald Spring (UNAM/CRIM, Mexico) introduces him as a Pioneer on Indigenous Rights due to his research on human rights issues, especially when he served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples. First, in a retrospective Stavenhagen reviews his scientific and political work for the rights of indigenous peoples. Seven of his classic texts address Seven Fallacies about Latin America (1965); Decolonializing Applied Social Sciences (1971); Ethnodevelopment: A Neglected Dimension in Development Thinking (1986); Human Rights and Wrongs: A Place for Anthropologists (1998); Indigenous Peoples and the State in Latin America: An Ongoing Debate (2000); Building Intercultural Citizenship through Education: A Human Rights Approach (2006); and Making the Declaration Work (2006). This volume discusses the emergence of indigenous peoples as new social and political actors at the national level in numerous countries, as well as on the international scene. This book introduces a trilogy of Briefs on Rodolfo Stavenhagen published in the same series Pioneers in Science and Practice.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 184 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -This volume of essays grew out of a symposium organized by Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring for the 1974 American Anthropological Association meetings in Mexico City. The two-part symposium was enti tled 'Women in Ritual and Symbolic Systems: I. Midwives, Madonnas, and Mediums; ll. Prostitutes, Witches, and Androgynes. ' The sym posium participants were asked to explore theological, ritual, and sym bolic aspects-both positive and negative-of the feminine cultural do main, using ethnographic materials with which they were familiar. The resulting papers have been revised, edited, and gathered together in Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles. The theoretical importance of these papers for the study of women's participation in culture and society rests on the assumption that reli gious ideas are paramount forces in social life, that relationships be tween the sexes, the nature of female sexuality, and the social and cul tural roles of women are in large part defined by religious ideas. That this proposition remains valid long after religion itself has ceased to be a living truth in the lives of many people can be seen from the tenacious ness of Judeo-Christian ideas about women in the contemporary West ern world. Both the expansion of life options for women and the creation of more positive cultural images of the female are intimately related to changes in the my tho-symbolic portraits that people carry around in their heads. These portraits are almost exclusively constructed from mythological and religious conceptions inherent in all facets of culture.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 308 pp. Englisch.