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This book completes the project, begun in Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy, of critically reconstructing a Nietzschean left politics. Nietzsche's incompatibilist ideal of amor fati requires reconceiving legitimacy as the breeding of a people whose material conditions enable it to affirm its social order. Justice is founded in a future, higher type's right to exist against present individuals who internalize the contradictions of past societies. In opposition to Nietzsche's self-undermining aristocratism, this right can only be realized through a universal promotion of the pluralistic unity of the manifold soul, secured by an equally manifold form of democracy. Against the covert aristocratism of liberal proceduralism, authentic democracy produces a true people grounded in shared, concrete happiness, requiring a comprehensive egalitarianism maintained by a permanent socialist state and achievable only through a populist, coalitional politics across identities that radically transforms the material conditions of our shared social life.

The importance of thermodynamics, particularly its Second Principle, to all branches of science in which systems with very large numbers of particles are involved cannot be overstated. This book offers a panoramic view of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Perhaps the two most attractive aspects of thermodynamic equilibrium are its stability and its independence from the specifics of the particular system involved. Does an equivalent exist for non-equilibrium thermodynamics? Many researchers have tried to describe such stability in the same way that the Second Principle describes the stability of thermodynamic equilibrium - and failed. Most of them invoked either entropy, or its production rate, or some modified version of it. In their efforts, however, those researchers have found a lot of useful stability criteria for far-from-equilibrium states. These criteria usually take the form of variational principles, in terms of the minimization or maximization of some quantity. The aim of this book is to discuss these variational principles by highlighting the role of macroscopic quantities. This book is aimed at a wider audience than those most often exposed to the criteria described, i.e., undergraduates in STEM, as well as the usual interested and invested professionals. 

Billions of people worldwide take medicines every day to treat important diseases. In many cases, however, neither the doctor nor the pharmacist has the time to explain to the patient why a particular drug should be taken, how the drug works and what side effects to expect. Of course, the patient can find "e;everything"e; about a particular drug on the Internet. But how reliable and understandable is this information? In addition, most Internet sources do not point out the interrelationships between different diseases and drug interactions. Written by an experienced and well-known textbook author, this book provides an overview of the most common diseases and the drugs used to treat them. The book is designed for a general audience. It provides patients with essential information about how medications work and what side effects and interactions to expect. Finally, the book gives patients advice on what they can do themselves to improve drug therapy and safety. Summaries, bullet points, tables and diagrams support the information process.

Psychedelic therapies are gaining traction as potential treatments for a wide range of indications, but the structure and delivery of psychedelic therapies are a sharp departure from more traditional models of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy for psychiatric and other medical disorders. This may be critical to their success. The current volume provides a comprehensive review of the state of the science of psychedelic therapies, including discussion of models and approaches to psychedelic therapies as well as the current status of safety and efficacy data for mood, substance use, trauma, obsessive-compulsive, neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative disorders, neurological, and inflammatory disorders.

This book focuses on multi-party computation (MPC) protocols in the passive corruption model (also known as the semi-honest or honest-but-curious model). The authors present seminal possibility and feasibility results in this model and includes formal security proofs. Even though the passive corruption model may seem very weak, achieving security against such a benign form of adversary turns out to be non-trivial and demands sophisticated and highly advanced techniques. MPC is a fundamental concept, both in cryptography as well as distributed computing. On a very high level, an MPC protocol allows a set of mutually-distrusting parties with their private inputs to jointly and securely perform any computation on their inputs. Examples of such computation include, but not limited to, privacy-preserving data mining; secure e-auction; private set-intersection; and privacy-preserving machine learning. MPC protocols emulate the role of an imaginary, centralized trusted third party (TTP) that collects the inputs of the parties, performs the desired computation, and publishes the result. Due to its powerful abstraction, the MPC problem has been widely studied over the last four decades.

This book makes connections between selfhood, reading practice and moral judgment which propose fresh insights into Austen's narrative style and offer new ways of reading her work. It grounds her writing in the Enlightenment philosophy of selfhood, exploring how Austen takes five major components of selfhood theory-memory, imagination, probability, sympathy and reflection-and investigates their relation to self-formation and moral judgement. At the same time, Austen's narrative style breaks new ground in the representation of consciousness and engages directly with contemporary concerns about reading practice. Drawing analogies between reading text and reading character, the book argues that Austen's rendering of reading and rereading as both reflective and constitutive acts demonstrates their capacity to enable self-recognition and self-formation. It shows how Austen raises questions about the potential for different readings and, in so doing, challenges her readers to reflect on and reread their own interactions with her texts.

This book argues that there are constant formations of online public spheres in present-day China, prompted by never-ending news. It contends that these publics are chronic, although individually they are usually transient. They are networked, which enables them to go viral in hours, and they may engender unexpected consequences. These features explain why online public spheres survive in China even though censorship and information manipulation are pervasively and strategically maneuvered to guide or manufacture "e;public opinion"e;. The book also proposes that there are deeply entangled structural factors bolstering China's online news-prompted public spheres: the continuous flow of news information, the countless public spaces facilitated by China's digital infrastructure and the rise of rights-conscious netizens. Pushing forward a new way of conceptualizing the idea of public spheres, this book contends clearly that public spheres are most often sparked by chronic news in today's media-saturated societies. Delving into the life cycles of public spheres, it goes beyond static analysis of individual public spheres and instead studies their five qualities, which, except for the networked quality, have never been systematically addressed in scholarship. 

Authenticity is a highly-prized concept on social media, but given the history of the term, has it been adequately scrutinised? This book provides an alternative definition of authentic social media practice and suggests that, rather than being an achievable ideal, authenticity reveals itself as an unrepeatable temporary interval. Applying a post-structural lens of performativity, Taylor analyses the resurgence of the authentic as a cultural trend and argues that the professionalisation of social media has given rise to a 'neoliberal authentic' that equates productivity with self-actualisation, questioning whether society should present this as a cultural ideal. Using a new critical framework, Taylor recontextualises authenticity in a variety of social media practices. This includes authentic self-representation, authentic influence and its effect in influencer culture, as well as meme production as an attempt to find authenticity. Part-reader, part-manifesto, the book asks readers to reappraise authenticity and provides a working definition for future practice.

This edited volume represents a collective contribution to the current debates on developing university research capacity.  The chapters in this volume offer empirical case studies from post-Soviet countries which share a common history, common policies and practices of higher education. These commonalities make the regional focus meaningful and analytically valid. At the same time, the case studies demonstrate divergence from the shared Soviet tradition and offer historical, sociological, and political analyses of how and in what ways universities in former Soviet countries internalised their research mission and developed the capacity to carry out this mission. This volume is the first of its kind to examine national and institutional resources, political will, and individual agency to understand how these influenced universities' motivation, expertise, and opportunities of undertaking research since the early 1990s, and how universities changed their structures and practices under these influences. The book will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of education, sociology, political science, and economics.

Much of the earth's population is dependent on agriculture as it provides food for their sustenance. Successful crop production depends to a considerable extent on land and climate. Soil is the main component of land and a fertile soil is essential for crop growth. However, soil fertility declines over the years mainly due to land degradation.  Hence, implementing appropriate measures to control land degradation is important. It is the responsibility of the farmers and the governments to take action to control land degradation. Agricultural extension officers are involved in making farmers aware of land degradation and control measures. Planners and policy makers  need scientific assessments on land degradation and its implications so that they could advice the relevant authorities who prepare the national programs and budgets. This book highlights issues related to land degradation, the causal factors and methods of control. The audience is agricultural practitioners and planners as well as students of agriculture. Environmentalists would also benefit by understanding the main issues related to land degradation discussed.

This book provides new and critical perspectives on the internal development of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (the PCSWA; Pugwash) and its role in international nuclear diplomacy during the 1960s Cold War.  Conceived by western scientists dissenting from their own government's position on nuclear weapons, the conferences brought together elite scientists from across the East-West divide to work towards nuclear disarmament and for peace. The analysis follows two lines. First, the book charts the emergence during the conferences of a distinctive form of technopolitical communication that was crucial to the role of Pugwash in Informal cross-bloc dialogue about disarmament. This enabled Pugwash to realize its paradoxical vision of working both with and against governments to promote disarmament and was key to its role as both a forum for and actor within the realm of informal diplomacy. It is argued that Pugwash scientists formed the vanguard of what came in the 1960s to be called Track II diplomacy. The relevance of the contemporary concept of Science Diplomacy for Pugwash is discussed. The second analytical focus of the book centers on the internal dynamics of the international Pugwash organization. It is argued that informal modes of working and a code of confidentiality accorded the leadership enormous power and autonomy: this small network of senior figures was able to control the Pugwash agenda and priorities, and to launch diplomatic initiatives beyond the conferences. However, by 1967, competing interests were fueling tensions and instability within Pugwash as it struggled for coherence and direction amid with the political challenges posed by the Vietnam War and European security. This crisis manifest the limits of the Pugwash project and placed its future in doubt.

This book provides a novel exploration of time and temporality in relation to punishment and criminal sanctioning. It goes beyond focussing on the prison to address punishment more broadly with contributions on punishment in the community (including after periods of imprisonment) and in areas of the criminal justice system which have typically received less attention such as prison transportation between prisons. The collection also includes a focus on temporality in criminal justice policy, and its potential impacts on speeding up justice, as well as the experiential nature of punishment. The book includes contributions from scholars in UK and Europe, with largely original research, and draws on the international literature. It hopes to encourage punishment scholars to consider how ideas from the sociology of time can inform their own research.

This thesis provides the first atomic length-scale observation of the structural transformation (referred to as lattice reconstruction) that occurs in moire superlattices of twisted bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) at low (I < 2Es) twist angles. Such information is essential for the fundamental understanding of how manipulating the rotational twist-angle between two adjacent 2-dimensional crystals subsequently affects their optical and electrical properties.Studies using Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), a powerful tool for atomic-scale imaging, were limited due to the complexity of the (atomically-thin) sample fabrication requirements. This work developed a unique way to selectively cut and re-stack monolayers of TMDs with a controlled rotational twist angle which could then be easily suspended on a TEM grid to meet the needs of the atomically thin sample requirements. The fabrication technique enabled the study of the two common stacking-polytypes including 3R and 2H (using MoS2 and WS2 as the example) as well as their structural evolution with decreasing twist-angle.Atomic-scale studies were followed by a comprehensive investigation of their electronic properties using scanning probe microscopy and electrical transport measurements of the artificially-engineered structures. The electronic structure of two common stacking-polytypes (3R and 2H) were strikingly different, as revealed by conductive atomic force microscopy. Further studies focused on the 3R-stacking polytype to reveal room-temperature out-of-plane ferroelectricity using tools such as kelvin probe force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and electrical transport measurements. This work highlights that the unique intrinsic properties of TMDs (i.e. semiconductors with strongly light-matter interaction) combined with the additional twisted degree-of-freedom has great potential to create atomically thin transistors/LEDs with built-in memory storage functions and will further aid in the development of the next generation of optoelectronics.

Keep on running by clever burning! This book reports how humans created materials, machines and power plants with the help of fire and which fuels, with their advantages and disadvantages, they have used so far. "e;Climate rescuers"e; of all stripes, whether qualified for such challenge or not, want to eliminate the fire completely and replace it with electricity from photovoltaics and wind power.The book contains facts and evidence as to why solar panels and windmills cannot be sufficient to ensure all the world's energy needs. Neither combustion nor thermal engines are responsible for the environmental hazard till now, but the fuels they have received in the past. Let's feed the fire with nature-compatible fuels and let it unfold properly in very effective machines and systems! The book describes systematically and comprehensibly for everyone, thermodynamic laws and methods for the design of very efficient machines and drives, as well as regenerative, climate-neutral fuels. This lecture is highly recommended when seating in front of a fireplace or sitting beside a campfire.

This Palgrave Pivot offers new readings of Maria Edgeworth's representations of slavery. It shows how Edgeworth employed satiric technique and intertextual allusion to represent discourses of slavery and abolition as a litmus test of character - one that she invites readers to use on themselves. Over the course of her career, Edgeworth repeatedly indicted hypocritical and hyperbolic misappropriation of the sentimental rhetoric that dominated the slavery debate. This book offers new readings of canonical Edgeworth texts as well as of largely neglected works, including: Whim for Whim, "e;The Good Aunt"e;, Belinda, "e;The Grateful Negro"e;, "e;The Two Guardians"e;, and Harry and Lucy Continued. It also offers an unprecedented deep-dive into an important Romantic Era woman writer's engagement with discourses of slavery and abolition.  

This book will fill an important gap in literature covering the clinical health psychology applications affecting the military and veteran health care systems. The authors draw on a wealth of experience related to treatment of service members and veterans, implementation of innovative research programs within military settings, and analysis of health economics issues. Section I examines key economic challenges facing civilian, military and Veteran healthcare providers. Section II discusses innovative clinical health psychology applications in military hospitals and clinics from around the country, including comprehensive literature reviews and presenting novel clinical applications in military hospitals. This book is relevant for clinicians, policymakers and administrators working with military and veteran patients. 

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis, MIUA 2022, held in Cambridge, UK, in July 2022. The 65 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. They were organized according to following topical sections: biomarker detection; image registration, and reconstruction; image segmentation; generative models, biomedical simulation and modelling; classification; image enhancement, quality assessment, and data privacy; radiomics, predictive models, and quantitative imaging.Chapter "e;FCN-Transformer Feature Fusion for Polyp Segmentation"e; is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This monograph presents new insights into the perturbation theory of dynamical systems based on the Gromov-Hausdorff distance.  In the first part, the authors introduce the notion of Gromov-Hausdorff distance between compact metric spaces, along with the corresponding distance for continuous maps, flows, and group actions on these spaces. They also focus on the stability of certain dynamical objects like shifts, global attractors, and inertial manifolds.  Applications to dissipative PDEs, such as the reaction-diffusion and Chafee-Infante equations, are explored in the second part.  This text will be of interest to graduates students and researchers working in the areas of topological dynamics and PDEs.  

Knowledge of automata theory and formal languages is crucial for understanding human-computer interaction, as well as for understanding the various processes that take place when manipulating knowledge if that knowledge is, indeed, expressed as sentences written in a suitably formalized language. In particular, it is at the basis of the theory of parsing, which plays an important role in language translation, compiler construction, and knowledge manipulation in general.Presenting basic notions and fundamental results, this concise textbook is structured on the basis of a correspondence that exists between classes of automata and classes of languages. That correspondence is established by the fact that the recognition and the manipulation of sentences in a given class of languages can be done by an automaton in the corresponding class of automata. Four central chapters center on: finite automata and regular languages; pushdown automata and context-free languages; linear bounded automata and context-sensitive languages; and Turing machines and type 0 languages.  The book also examines decidable and undecidable problems with emphasis on the case for context-free languages.Topics and features:Provides theorems, examples, and exercises to clarify automata-languages correspondencesPresents some fundamental techniques for parsing both regular and context-free languagesClassifies subclasses of decidable problems, avoiding focus on the theory of complexityExamines finite-automata minimalization and characterization of their behavior using regular expressionsIllustrates how to derive grammars of context-free languages in Chomsky and Greibach normal formsOffers supplementary material on counter machines, stack automata, and abstract language familiesThis highly useful, varied text/reference is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses on automata theory and formal languages, and assumes no prior exposure to these topics nor any training in mathematics or logic.Alberto Pettorossi is professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy.

This book serves as a brief introduction to phylogenetic trees and molecular evolution for biologists and biology students. It does so by presenting the main concepts in a variety of ways: first visually, then in a history, next in a dice game, and finally in simple equations. The content is primarily designed to introduce upper-level undergraduate and graduate students of biology to phylogenetic tree reconstruction and the underlying models of molecular evolution.  A unique feature also of interest to experienced researchers is the emphasis on simple ways to quantify the uncertainty in the results more fully than is possible with standard methods.

FinTech is an emerging field and most of the existing literature appears in the form of industry reports, consulting reports, working papers, and policy recommendations. Although FinTech has been widely discussed for many years, there is a paucity of literature on some categorizations of FinTech. This edited volume distinguishes itself by focusing on academic works of scholars with a different area of specialization in the FinTech field including technology, innovation and regulation. In particular, the book focuses on the laws and technologies necessary to comprehend the role of the legal system in technological innovations and will be helpful for regulatory policymaking. A practical compendium that explains concepts and follows through on applications in FinTech including its challenges and evolving nature, this book will be of interest to students, scholars, practitioners as well as regulators and policy makers.

This book examines the factors that shape the adoption and continuous usage of new technology by employees in organizations. While within an organization new technology adoption has evolved from its traditional role to a more strategic one, the appropriate adoption of new technology can only add value to organizations. Identifying the factors that influence this adoption process is crucial for successful adoption of new technology in organizations.The study presented in this book focuses on individual, organizational, social, and industrial factors and uses those to offer a comprehensive model of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application adoption. It contributes towards understanding employees' acceptance and adoption of enterprise-level technological innovation, allowing organizations to create a work environment conducive to individual implementation and acceptance of new technology. It appeals to researchers interested in studying the adoption of ERP and other innovative technologies in organizations.

This book explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers - Yosa Buson (1716-83), Ema Saiko (1787-1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), and Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) - experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetry in Japanese literature. Through rigorous close readings, this study changes our understanding of the relationship between lyric form and the representation of self, sense, and feeling in Japanese poetic writing from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The book aims to reach a broad audience, including specialists in East Asian Studies, Anglophone literary studies, and Comparative Literature. 

This book explores the concept of the "e;best-loved self"e; in teaching and teacher education, asserting that the best-loved self is foundational to the development of teacher identity, growth in context, and learning in community. Drawing on the work of Joseph Schwab, who was the first to name the "e;best-loved self,"e; the editors and their contributors extend this knowledge further through the collaboration of their group of teacher educators, known as the Faculty Academy, who have been involved in examining teacher education for over two decades.  

This monograph is dedicated to the lives and scientific achievements of the physiology pioneers Warren and Margaret Lewis. Their story spans the first half of the 20th century, from their respective educations through early, independent research to joint research from 1910 to 1955. Among the numerous developments they initiated, were the discovery of pinocytosis, the beginnings of video microscopy and the development of the first mammalian tissue cultures. Their research expanded the theoretical knowledge of cell structure and function. On a more practical level, they advanced many laboratory methods, like the first recipes for culture media. The text is beautifully enriched with personal anecdotes about their lives.This is the story of two scientific pioneers in the context of early 20th century biology and physiology. It is an inspiration for senior and aspiring researchers.

This PhD thesis reports on investigations of several oxide-based materials using advanced infrared and Raman spectroscopy techniques and in combination with external stimuli such as high magnetic or electric field, sptial confinement in thin film heterostructures and the radiation with UV light. This leads to new results in the fields of superconductivity, electronic polarization states and nanoscale phenomena.Among these, the observation of anomalous polar moments is of great relevance for understanding the electric-field-induced metal-to-insulator transistion; and the demonstration that confocal Raman spectroscopy of backfolded acoustic photons in metal-oxide multilayers  can be used as a powerful characterization tool for monitoring their interface properties and layer thickness is an important technical development for the engineering of such functional oxide heterostructures. 

Anti-natalism is the provocative view that it is either always or almost always all-things-considered wrong to procreate. Philanthropic anti-natalist arguments say that procreation is always impermissible because of the harm done to individuals who are brought into existence. Misanthropic arguments, on the other hand, hold that procreation is usually impermissible given the harm that individuals will do once brought into existence. The main purpose of this short monograph is to demonstrate that David Benatar's misanthropic argument for anti-natalism ought to be endorsed by any version of African Communitarianism. Not only that, but there are also resources in the African philosophical tradition that offer unique support for the argument. Given the emphasis that indigenous African worldviews place on the importance of procreation and the immediate family unit this result is highly surprising. This book marks the first attempt to bring anti-natalism into conversation with contemporary African ethics.

This book explores disrupted youth cohesion in France within the context of multiple ongoing global economic, migratory, social, political, and security-related crises. While these trends can be observed in numerous Western societies, France provides a unique case study of various anti-cosmopolitan and anti-Enlightenment movements shaping youth conditions and reconfiguring relationships between the individual, the group, and society. The authors undertook in-depth interviews with French young people between the ages of 18 to 30 years old to inquire into how they experience "e;vivre ensemble"e; (living together) in a time of rising economic inequalities and multicultural tensions. Through these findings, they invite decision-makers, politicians, educators, and parents to propose a renewed narrative of social cohesion for youth who are not disillusioned, but deeply on edge.

This book gives an introduction to discrete-time Markov chains which evolve on a separable metric space. The focus is on the ergodic properties of such chains, i.e., on their long-term statistical behaviour. Among the main topics are existence and uniqueness of invariant probability measures, irreducibility, recurrence, regularizing properties for Markov kernels, and convergence to equilibrium. These concepts are investigated with tools such as Lyapunov functions, petite and small sets, Doeblin and accessible points, coupling, as well as key notions from classical ergodic theory. The theory is illustrated through several recurring classes of examples, e.g., random contractions, randomly switched vector fields, and stochastic differential equations, the latter providing a bridge to continuous-time Markov processes.  The book can serve as the core for a semester- or year-long graduate course in probability theory with an emphasis on Markov chains or random dynamics. Some of the material is also well suited for an ergodic theory course. Readers should have taken an introductory course on probability theory, based on measure theory. While there is a chapter devoted to chains on a countable state space, a certain familiarity with Markov chains on a finite state space is also recommended.

This book gathers peer-reviewed contributions submitted to the 21st European Conference on Mathematics for Industry, ECMI 2021, which was virtually held online, hosted by the University of Wuppertal, Germany, from April 13th to April 15th, 2021. The works explore mathematics in a wide variety of applications, ranging from problems in electronics, energy and the environment, to mechanics and mechatronics. Topics covered include: Applied Physics, Biology and Medicine, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Economics, Finance and Insurance, Energy, Production Systems, Social Challenges, and Vehicles and Transportation.The goal of the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) conference series is to promote interaction between academia and industry, leading to innovations in both fields. These events have attracted leading experts from business, science and academia, and have promoted the application of novel mathematical technologies to industry. They have also encouraged industrial sectors to share challenging problems where mathematicians can provide fresh insights and perspectives. Lastly, the ECMI conferences are one of the main forums in which significant advances in industrial mathematics are presented, bringing together prominent figures from business, science and academia to promote the use of innovative mathematics in industry.