Designer Cropping Systems for Polluted Land explores the processes and techniques of making polluted land safe for planting edible and non-edible crops. The book provides readers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of contaminated land use through designer cropping systems. It seeks to present promising and affordable practices for transforming polluted lands while also providing an excellent basis from which scientific knowledge can grow and widen in the fields of phytoremediation-based biofortification.

Adaptive Phytoremediation Practices: Resilience to Climate Change discusses current phytoremediation practices under an ever-pressing need for environmental remediation due to increasing pollution in a changing climate. Phytoremediation is increasingly relevant due to plants' high effectiveness and sustainability during remediation and the ability of potential phytoremediation plants to adapt to changes in climate. Changing climatic conditions cause various biotic and abiotic stresses in plants and thereby negatively affect a plant's establishment, growth, and yield. Therefore, the integration of suitable climate-resilient plants and adaptive remedial practices along with proper agro-biotechnological interventions is of paramount importance to mitigate the rapidly growing pollution. This book is an important reference for environmental scientists, particularly those working in pollution management and remediation, forming an up-to-date collection of phytoremediation practices that provide sustainable solutions as a holistic approach for carrying out phytoremediation under changing climatic conditions.

Individuals exist in both the real and the virtual worlds, and it is not always clear which sphere is more important to them. Cyberspace provides many opportunities, challenges, and risks. Virtual worlds create chances for many people to revive and carry out dangerous or malicious intentions, frustrations, or vices. While vices like gambling impact the individual seeking a risk, many are unwillingly subjected to these dangerous behaviors, including bullying, stalking, human trafficking, and more, which circulate between real and virtual worlds and present a danger for anyone in cyberspace, social networks, and virtual groups. Analyzing New Forms of Social Disorders in Modern Virtual Environments provides expert articles from the areas of psychology, sociology, technology, and security on the phenomena and interplay of virtual lives, real behavior, and subsequent peril and also provides major challenges and safety measures. Covering topics such as cyber bullying, virtual violence, and virtual terror, this book is ideal for school instructors, administrators, psychology practitioners, scientists, and police.

In today's modern world, persistent violence against vulnerable groups and minorities permeates societies, making it difficult for them to flourish. Empowering these groups has never been more important as society attempts to evolve and focus on inclusion. To understand the best practices and challenges of empowerment for minorities, further study is required. Fighting for Empowerment in an Age of Violence analyzes the different forms of violence against vulnerable groups and minorities, states their civil rights, and illustrates the forms of weakening and violence supported by authorities against their own citizens. The book also highlights the challenges for people marked as unequal or weak and the possibilities that the 21st century offers to empower them. Covering topics such as gender roles, political violence, societal security, and globalization, this reference work is ideal for government officials, sociologists, psychologists, politicians, security experts, activists, researchers, academicians, practitioners, scholars, educators, and students.

The 1990s violence in the Former Yugoslavia, the worst in Europe since World War II, triggered the conversion of multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and cosmopolitan areas of idiosyncratic and independent socialism into regions of xenophobic nationalism, wars, and, afterwards, Western-style democracy and capitalism. Unified by their artistic response to these cataclysmic changes, post-Yugoslav literary works and films have much to offer the wider world. Crnkovic reveals select post-Yugoslav literary and cinema works as groundbreaking exploratory achievements of global relevance. She presents post-Yugoslav literature and film as art that makes us aware of previously unconsidered things that bring us wars, and those that constitute part of the tapestry of peace. She foregrounds the radical potential of art to change and enrich the global landscapes of concepts, sensitivities, and politics. As such her book is important not only for those interested in this region, but also for all those wanting to discover and engage with world literature and cinema, and willing to encounter the potential of great new art to illuminate and challenge the world we live in.

This book enriches our views on representation and deepens our understanding of its different aspects. It arises out of several years of dialog between the editors and the authors, an interdisciplinary team of highly experienced researchers, and it reflects the best contemporary view of representation and reality in humans, other living beings, and intelligent machines. Structured into parts on the cognitive, computational, natural sciences, philosophical, logical, and machine perspectives, a theme of the field and the book is building and presenting networks, and the editors hope that the contributed chapters will spur understanding and collaboration between researchers in domains such as computer science, philosophy, logic, systems theory, engineering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, linguistics, and synthetic biology.

This book offers readers a single-source reference to the implementation aspects of multirate systems, advances in design of comb decimation filters and multirate filter banks. The authors describe a variety of the most recent applications in fields such as, image and video processing, digital communications, software and cognitive radio.

Expressions of hate are an almost daily feature of the evening news, from the mayhem unleashed by suicide bombers in Israel to the unimaginable destruction of the Twin Towers. And since September 11, Americans have repeatedly asked themselves, "Why do they hate us?" In this in-depth look at the most troubling aspect of human nature, a prominent, nationally recognized criminologist, who is a leader in his field, and a respected sociologist seek to explain why hate exists and offer practical methods for creating a more peaceable society.
Are we born with a propensity to hate, or is it something we learn? Does educating people necessarily reduce hate? Looking at biological, psychological, and cultural factors, Drs. Levin and Rabrenovic investigate the evidence for hate as an inborn trait, as learned behavior, and as a reaction to envy, frustration, or the need for belonging, control, and authority.
These highly regarded authors will reveal their new original findings on hate among Americans as well as the media's role in contributing to hate. They will also consider the phenomena of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism before and after September 11, in addition to anti-Muslim sentiments in the wake of the Twin Towers attack. Also discussed are domestic terrorism and "organized hate" in the form of white supremacist and civilian militia groups. Finally, in surveying the many trouble spots around the world where hate is manifest, they describe a series of inspiring situations that show surprising cooperation between ethnic groups who have transcended hate, and the authors explain how they achieved it.
Both enlightening and insightful, this momentous and timely work offers hope that civilized human beings can come to grips with an age-old problem.

"Biomimetics and Stem Cells: Methods and Protocols" collects a series of approaches to demonstrate the role and value of biomimetics for the better understanding of stem cell behavior and the acceleration of their application in regenerative medicine. Recent advances in tissue engineering are enabling scientists to instruct stem cells toward differentiating into the right phenotypes, in the right place and at the right time. Given these advances, biomimetic environments are being designed to recapitulate, in vitro, the combinations of factors known to guide tissue development and regeneration in vivo and thereby help unlock the full potential of the stem cells. Written in the highly successful "Methods in Molecular Biology" series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls.Practical and essential, "Biomimetics and Stem Cells: Methods and Protocols" focuses on the use of biomimetic systems for stem cells in order to aid in moving this vital field of study forward."

Scale is a word which underlies much of architectural and urban design practice, its history and theory, and its technology. Its connotations have traditionally been linked with the humanities, in the sense of relating to human societies and to human form. To build in scale is an aspiration that is usually taken for granted by most of those involved in architectural production, as well as by members of the public; yet in a world where value systems of all kinds are being questioned, the term has come under renewed scrutiny. The older, more particular, meanings in the humanities, pertaining to classical Western culture, are where the sense of scale often resides in cultural production.

Scale may be traced back, ultimately, to the discovery of musical harmonies, and in the arithmetic proportional relationship of the building to its parts. One might question the continued relevance of this understanding of scale in the global world of today. What, in other words, is culturally specific about scale? And what does scale mean in a world where an intuitive, visual understanding is often undermined or superseded by other senses, or by hyper-reality? Structured thematically in three parts, this book addresses various issues of scale. The book includes an introduction which sets the scene in terms of current architectural discourse and also contains a visual essay in each section. It is of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics and practitioners in architecture and architectural theory as well as to students in a range of other disciplines including art history and theory, geography, anthropology and landscape architecture.

This book summarizes the preparation, characterization and applications of rubber based nano blends. Rubbers from natural and synthetic polymers and their blends are discussed in the individual chapters, including nitrile, polyurethane, chlorosulphonated, polybutadiene, styrene butadiene, polychloroprene rubbers. In each chapter, contributors from academia and industry describe the preparation and characterization of the rubber blends. Therefore, a variety of characterization methods like tensile testing, differential scanning calorimetry, dynamical mechanical analysis, thermogravimetric analysis, electron microscopy, scattering and diffraction techniques, and rheology measurements are utilized. The authors evaluate the properties of the different materials and discuss numerous fields of application, ranging from biomedicine, packaging, coatings and automobile to aerospace.

This book is about nature considered as the totality of physical existence, the universe, and our present day attempts to understand it. If we see the universe as a network of networks of computational processes at many different levels of organization, what can we learn about physics, biology, cognition, social systems, and ecology expressed through interacting networks of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, cells, (and especially neurons when it comes to understanding of cognition and intelligence), organs, organisms and their ecologies? Regarding our computational models of natural phenomena Feynman famously wondered: "Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?" Phenomena themselves occur so quickly and automatically in nature. Can we learn how to harness nature's computational power as we harness its energy and materials? This volume includes a selection of contributions from the Symposium on Natural Computing/Unconventional Computing and Its Philosophical Significance, organized during the AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012, held in Birmingham, UK, on July 2-6, on the occasion of the centenary of Alan Turing's birth. In this book, leading researchers investigated questions of computing nature by exploring various facets of computation as we find it in nature: relationships between different levels of computation, cognition with learning and intelligence, mathematical background, relationships to classical Turing computation and Turing's ideas about computing nature - unorganized machines and morphogenesis. It addresses questions of information, representation and computation, interaction as communication, concurrency and agent models; in short this book presents natural computing and unconventional computing as extension of the idea of computation as symbol manipulation.

Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia-no longer on the map. East Europe of the socialist period may seem like a historical oddity, apparently so different from everything before and after. Yet the masterpieces of literature and cinema from this largely forgotten "Second World," as well as by the authors formed in it and working in its aftermath, surprise and delight with their contemporary resonance. This book introduces and illuminates a number of these works. It explores how their aesthetic ingenuity discovers ways of engaging existential and universal predicaments, such as how one may survive in the world of victimizations, or imagine a good city, or broach the human boundaries to live as a plant. Like true classics of world art, these novels, stories, and films-to rephrase Bohumil Hrabal-keep "telling us things about ourselves we don't know." In lively and jargon-free prose, Gordana P. Crnkovic builds on her rich teaching experience to create paths to these works and reveal how they changed lives.

This book is about the lack of inclusion in the startup ecosystem for women entrepreneurs in India as well as the world due to which the challenges they face and how we can create inclusive ecosystem for women as well as other marginalised sections of the society. The twelve chapters of the book address a wide range of areas such as how entrepreneurship education may help create higher entrepreneurial intentions and how mentoring can help these first-time entrepreneurs set up, manage, sustain, and scale their startup. The international chapter authors in this book have written from different parts of the world such as Israel, Germany etc. and shared the challenges women or people from other marginalized sections of the society such as People with Disabilities across the world face. Some of the authors have written about sustainable businesses such as Green startups and green finance, revival of age old crafts by way of Diversity and Inclusion, how Covid has impacted women entrepreneurs and others. The chapters also offer action points that government, policy makers, incubators, accelerators, investors, universities can take up and create an integrated and inclusive eco-system that will offer end to end solutions for creating entrepreneurial intention among people from all walks of the society irrespective of gender, age, social status, disabilities, caste or creed. Anyone who is interested in becoming an entrepreneur or wants to help others who have entrepreneurial intention should read this book and see how it could benefit them as well as where and how they could contribute. Any corporate with an aim to extend their CSR activities and support these startups could learn how some other corporates are doing this. Aspirational women entrepreneurs could read it and find support at the right places.

This volume represents an attempt to link the theories and research of an interdisciplinary group of urbanists with the practical applications that scholars can help institute in the community. The articles in "Neighbourhood Politics", analyze political forces within local communities and their intersection with policy decisions about economic development. Those in "Community and Identity" examine the ways in which individuals are shaped by and respond to changing economic conditions in their communities. In "Perspectives on Community Issues and Policies" the authors explore the specific cases of child development, education reform and rent control policies as outcomes of contested or problematic community relations. The articles in "Information technology and Community Development" discuss models of community development linked to community networks. In "Institutional Support for Community Building" the authors show how the institutions of religion and higher education have the potential to strengthen local community development. Several of these papers were presented in an earlier form at meetings of the Urban Affairs Association in Toronto, USA (1997) or Fort Worth, USA (1998).

This book examines the ways women politicians in Serbia and Kosovo have imagined, constructed, and politicised national identity and gender while engaging with politics in the context of the democratisation process. The first book to focus on the work of women inside political structures, it draws on participant observation and interview material to answer the question of how women in positions of power and influence deal with their national identity and gender in societies deeply divided along ethnic lines. Based on close studies of the work of a small number of women from different ethnic backgrounds, the author offers comparative analyses of the ways in which women politicians of different ethnicities respond to similar events in their everyday work. An original political ethnography that considers engagement of women in formal politics, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in political structures and political participation, particularly as these relate to questions of gender, nation and ethnicity.

This book examines the ways women politicians in Serbia and Kosovo have imagined, constructed, and politicised national identity and gender while engaging with politics in the context of the democratisation process. The first book to focus on the work of women inside political structures, it draws on participant observation and interview material to answer the question of how women in positions of power and influence deal with their national identity and gender in societies deeply divided along ethnic lines. Based on close studies of the work of a small number of women from different ethnic backgrounds, the author offers comparative analyses of the ways in which women politicians of different ethnicities respond to similar events in their everyday work. An original political ethnography that considers engagement of women in formal politics, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in political structures and political participation, particularly as these relate to questions of gender, nation and ethnicity.

Croatia offers a sunny Adriatic coastline and breath-taking scenery, as well as a distinctive culinary tradition that combines central European, Mediterranean, and Near Eastern influences. This book offers over 200 recipes adapted for the American kitchen, featuring classic dishes like Turkey with Pasta Tatters, Strudel with Sauteed Risotto.

This book provides anyone needing a primer on random signals and processes with a highly accessible introduction to these topics. It assumes a minimal amount of mathematical background and focuses on concepts, related terms and interesting applications to a variety of fields. All of this is motivated by numerous examples implemented with MATLAB, as well as a variety of exercises at the end of each chapter."

The recent financial crisis has thrown many of the mergers and acquisitions of recent years into sharp focus. Too many have failed to generate real value for shareholders and many others have only proved lukewarm successes. Although it is impossible to assess accurately the extent to which these failures may be the result of poor planning and execution, they have raised considerable questions about the process, breadth and effectiveness of traditional due diligence activities. Value in Due Diligence explores new applications for due diligence including areas such as corporate culture, social responsibility, and innovation. It also examines the due diligence process itself to draw out those elements that provide effective risk and opportunity management as opposed to simple compliance.

This book considers cultural psychology from historical, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives, building an understanding of cultural psychology as a human science and moving beyond the nature-culture dichotomy. The unique collection of chapters seeks to advance the field of cultural psychology by reviving its historical legacies and arguing for its social responsibility in future historical developments. It considers European legacies for cultural psychology as developed by leading figures such as Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Ernst Cassirer in order to provide insights into a long tradition of thinking from a cultural psychology perspective. The book discusses historical pathways in the rise and repression of cultural psychology and its different historical forms, arguing for the necessity of decolonizing psychology, securing a place for culture in it, and developing an epistemology suited to humankind's meaning-making processes in mutual shaping of psyche and culture. It provides an integrative and historical understanding of the subject and uses the diversity and heterogeneity within the field to offer critical reflections on its achievements. The thoroughly international group of contributors brings diverse analyses of self, body, emotions, culture, and society and considers the future of cultural psychology. The volume is a stimulating read for scholars and students of cultural and theoretical psychology and related areas including philosophy, anthropology, and history.

From the mid-1960s onwards Michel Foucault has had a significant impact on diverse aspects of culture, knowledge and arts including architecture and its critical discourse. The implications for architecture have been wide-ranging. His archaeological and genealogical approaches to knowledge have transformed architectural history and theory, while his attitude to arts and aesthetics led to a renewed focus on the avant-garde. Prepared by an architect, this book offers an excellent entry point into the remarkable work of Michel Foucault, and provides a focused introduction suitable for architects, urban designers, and students of architecture. Foucault's crucial juxtaposition of space, knowledge and power has unlocked novel spatial possibilities for thinking about design in architecture and urbanism. While the philosopher's ultimate attention on the issues of body and sexuality has defined our understanding of the possibilities and limits of human condition and its relation to architecture. The book concentrates on a number of historical and theoretical issues often addressed by Foucault that have been grouped under the themes of archaeology, enclosure, bodies, spatiality and aesthetics in order to examine and demonstrate their relevancy for architectural knowledge, its history and its practice.

Die Beitrage dieses Bandes befassen sich mit dem sogenannten Slawenoserbischen, der Schriftsprache der Serben im spaten 18. und in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 19. Jahrhunderts, sowie mit dem Werk, Leben und Zeitalter des Sprachreformers Sava Mrkalj, dessen programmatischer Text Salo debeloga jera libo azbukoprotres vor 200 Jahren veroeffentlicht wurde. In diesem Kontext werden verschiedene Aspekte der Epoche, ihres Kulturparadigmas und der damaligen Schriftsprache behandelt. Einen weiteren thematischen Strang stellen die Arbeiten dar, die sich mit der Poetik, Rhetorik und den literarischen Richtungen des serbischen Schrifttums beschaftigen. Ein dritter Schwerpunkt gilt der beginnenden philologischen Arbeit, deren Anliegen die Schaffung einer Schrift- und Literatursprache fur das serbische Sozium war, das sich in dem UEbergang von der alten Kulturtradition und dem Lebensparadigma der Orthodoxen Slavia hin in die europaische Neuzeit befand.