This book is about skateboard video and experimental ways of thinking about cities. It makes a provocative argument to consider skate video as an archive of the city from below. Here 'below' has a dual meaning. First, below refers to an unofficial archive, a subaltern history of urban space. Second, below refers to the angle from which skateboarders and filmers gaze upon, capture, and consume the city-from the ground up. Since taking to the streets in the early 1980s, skateboarding has been captured on film, video tape and digital memory cards, edited into consumable forms and circulated around the world. Videos are objects amenable to ethnographic analysis while also archiving exercises in urban ethnography by their creators. I advocate for taking skate video seriously as a (fragile) archive of the urban backstage, collective memory across time and space, creative urban practice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and the globalization of a subculture at once delinquent and magnificent.

This book provides a critical approach to research on the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures and on energy transitions in general by questioning prevalent principles and proposing specific research pathways and lines of inquiry that look beyond depoliticised, business-as-usual discourses and research agendas on green growth and sustainability. It brings together authors from different socio-geographical and disciplinary backgrounds within the social sciences to reflect upon, discuss and advance what we propose to be five cornerstones of a critical approach: overcoming individualism and socio-cognitivism; repoliticisations - recognising and articulating power relations; for interdisciplinarity; interventions - praxis and political engagement with research; and overcoming localism and spatial determinism: As such, this book offers academics, students and practitioners alike a comprehensive perspective of what it means to be critical when inquiring into the social acceptance of renewable energy and associated infrastructures.

Geographic Information Systems GIS is a modern and effective technology to address developmental issues. All over the world, it is extensively used for resource management, environmental issues and policy decisions support systems with increasingly wider applications in agriculture, water resources development & management, veterinary sciences to disaster management. Being a new and interdisciplinary in nature, this interesting subject requires a lot of introductory textbook to improve understanding of the students. The author has put his teaching and research experience into good use and has brought out this concise and very readable book. With topics like: Hardware, software & liveware, recent developments Spatial and Map Projections and Database management, modeling, structuring, Networking, conversion and quality aspects finding their way in this book, which makes it worth reading for not only students but also for the teaching fraternity.

Adventures of a Mountain Man: The Narrative of Zenas Leonard is a remarkable true-life adventure story, a narrative of exploration, survival, conflict, capture, torture, and an insider's account of the daily life of an 1830's American fur trader and trapper in the early American West.

This book examines the relationship between national identity and foreign policy discourses on Russia in Germany, Poland and Finland in the years 2005–2015. The case studies focus on the Nord Stream pipeline controversy, the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, the post-electoral protests in Russian cities in 2011–2012 and the Ukraine crisis. Siddi argues that divergent foreign policy narratives of Russia are rooted in different national identity constructions. Most significantly, the Ukraine crisis and the Nord Stream controversy have exposed how deep-rooted and different perceptions of the 'Russian Other' in EU member states are still influential and lead to conflicting national agendas for foreign policy towards Russia.

Based on original fieldwork in Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico, this book offers a bridge between geography and historical sociology. Chris Hesketh examines the production of space within the global political economy. Drawing on multiple disciplines, Hesketh's discussion of state formation in Mexico takes us beyond the national level to explore the interplay between global, regional, national, and sub-national articulations of power. These are linked through the novel deployment of Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, understood as the state-led institution or expansion of capitalism that prevents the meaningful participation of the subaltern classes. Furthermore, the author brings attention to the conflicts involved in the production of space, placing particular emphasis on indigenous communities and movements and their creation of counterspaces of resistance. Hesketh argues that indigenous movements are now the leading social force of popular mobilization in Latin America. The author reveals how the wider global context of uneven and combined development frames these specific indigenous struggles, and he explores the scales at which they must now seek to articulate themselves.

This study examines the rise of the technopolis--high technology-based regional development. It explores how and why these regions emerged and the policies that have been devised to promote them. The rapid, propulsive growth of the technopolis in the 1960s and 1970s caught many people by surprise. Silicon Valley arose in an agricultural area; Route 128 in a stagnant manufacturing region. Throughout the rest of the world, a new generation of regional development policies have appeared, the most common ones being science parks, small business incubators, and venture capital funds. This book surveys these policies from a comparative, critical perspective. It also develops a theoretical framework for understanding why regional high-technology development occurs and the role policy can play in the process.

This work will be of interest to development planners and scholars in the fields of economic geography, development economics, and regional development.

Over the past century, mechanization has been an important means for optimizing resource utilization, improving worker health and safety and reducing labor requirements in farming while increasing productivity and quality of 4F (Food, Fuel, Fiber, Feed). Recognizing this contribution, agricultural mechanization was considered as one of the top ten engineering achievements of 20th century by the National Academy of Engineering. Accordingly farming communities have adopted increasing level of automation and robotics to further improve the precision management of crops (including input resources), increase productivity and reduce farm labor beyond what has been possible with conventional mechanization technologies. It is more important than ever to continue to develop and adopt novel automation and robotic solutions into farming so that some of the most complex agricultural tasks, which require huge amount of seasonal labor such as fruit and vegetable harvesting, could be automated while meeting the rapidly increasing need for 4F. In addition, continual innovation in and adoption of agricultural automation and robotic technologies is essential to minimize the use of depleting resources including water, minerals and other chemicals so that sufficient amount of safe and healthy food can be produced for current generation while not compromising the potential for the future generation. This book aims at presenting the fundamental principles of various aspects of automation and robotics as they relate to production agriculture (the branch of agriculture dealing with farming operations from field preparation to seeding, to harvesting and field logistics). The building blocks of agricultural automation and robotics that are discussed in the book include sensing and machine vision, control, guidance, manipulation and end-effector technologies. The fundamentals and operating principles of these technologies are explained with examples from cutting-edge research and development currently going on around the word. This book brings together scientists, engineers, students and professionals working in these and related technologies to present their latest examples of agricultural automation and robotics research, innovation and development while explaining the fundamentals of the technology. The book, therefore, benefits those who wish to develop novel agricultural engineering solutions and/or to adopt them in the future.