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This book offers philosophical readings of the contemporary university and is motivated by a series of pressing challenges in the global context of Higher Education. It argues that the university is a place for community, for refuge, for enlightenment and the careful questioning of knowledge, but it is also a place for visceral ambition and for intellectual cowardice, for blinkered individualism and professional competitiveness. In the context of a highly competitive post-crash global economy, contemporary students are placed under increasing pressure to distinguish themselves from their peers via a portfolio of learning excellence and extracurricular achievement. Growing numbers undertake part or full-time employment in order to cover registration fees and the basic costs of living. University staff take on very different forms of pressure that operate across the life-course of an academic career ¿ from early-career anxieties to the worries of moreprivileged and permanent faculty who fear they do not meet ever-changing structures, assumptions and demands of the university itself.This book argues that these interlinked agendas demand consideration from philosophers of education in Ireland, Europe and further afield. It proposes that we must embody a very careful balancing act: one where we remember the romantic ideals and promises of the university while still acknowledging the very real and pressing challenges faced by our staff and students. The book will be of interest to academics, graduate students, and advanced-level undergraduates in Philosophy, Education, Mental Health, and Organizational Psychology in both North America and Europe.

This book covers the latest developments in phenolic foams and their applications. Compared with polystyrene and polyurethane foams, phenolic foams are known as third-generation polymeric foams. Phenolic foams exhibit excellent fire-retardant properties, including low flammability, low peak heat release rate, no dripping during combustion, and low toxicity. This book discusses various aspects of phenolic foams including properties, synthesis, fabrication methodologies, and applications. The contents also cover the methods for toughening of phenolic foams to make them more widely applicable. This book is of interest to both academics and industry alike. It is also a useful reference for fire safety regulators and policy-makers looking for new materials and methods for sustainable fire protection.

Carbon stabilization involves to capturing carbon from the atmosphere and fix it in the forms soil organic carbon stock for a long period of time, it will be present to escape as a greenhouse gas in the form of carbon dioxide. Soil carbon storage is an important ecosystem service, resulting from interactions of several ecological processes. This process is primarily mediated by plants through photosynthesis, with carbon stored in the form of soil organic carbon. Soil carbon levels have reduced over decades of conversion of pristine ecosystems into agriculture landscape, which now offers the opportunity to store carbon from air into the soil. Carbon stabilization into the agricultural soils is a novel approach of research and offers promising reduction in the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.  This book brings together all aspects of soil carbon sequestration and stabilization, with a special focus on diversity of microorganisms and management practices of soil in agricultural systems. It discusses the role of ecosystem functioning, recent and future prospects, soil microbial ecological studies, rhizosphere microflora, and organic matter in soil carbon stabilization. It also explores carbon transformation in soil, biological management and its genetics, microbial transformation of soil carbon, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPRs), and their role in sustainable agriculture.  The book offers a spectrum of ideas of new technological inventions and fundamentals of soil sustainability. It will be suitable for teachers, researchers, and policymakers, undergraduate and graduate students of soil science, soil microbiology, agronomy, ecology, and environmental sciences 

This book seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. Taking an inclusive cultural studies perspective, it questions the ideological narrative of 'race' and 'ethnicity' that dominates explanations of conflicts and cleavages in the Malaysian context. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. 'Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexities and Hybridities' takes a range of empirical studies-literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation-to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. This then opens up an examination of 'Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses', in which contributors deal with counter-hegemonic social movements-of anti-racism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing-that explicitly seek to open up greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. The third section, 'Identities and Narratives: Culture and the Media', then provides a close textual reading of some exemplars of new cultural and media practices found in oral testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. This book is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of identity and nationhood in Malaysia, and for those with wider interests in the fields of critical cultural studies and discourse analysis."e;Here is a fresh, startling book to aid the task of unbinding the straitjackets of 'Malay', 'Chinese' and 'Indian', with which colonialism bound Malaysia's plural inheritance, and on which the postcolonial state continues to rely. In it, a panoply of unlikely identities-Bajau liminality, Kelabit philosophy, Islamic feminism, refugee hybridity and more-finds expression and offers hope for liberation"e;. Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge"e;This book shakes the foundations of race thinking in Malaysian studies by expanding the range of cases, perspectives and outcomes of identity. It offers students of Malaysia an examination of identity and agency that is expansive, critical and engaging, and its interdisciplinary depth brings Malaysian studies into conversation with scholarship across the world"e;.Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia"e;This is a much-needed work that helps us to take apart the colonial inherited categories of race which informed the notion of the plural society, the idea of plurality without multiculturalism. It complicates the picture of identity by bringing in religion, gender, indigeneity and sexual orientation, and helps us to imagine what a truly multiculturalist Malaysia might look like"e;.Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th China Conference onMachine Translation, CCMT 2022, held in Lhasa, China, during August 6-10, 2022.The 16 full papers were included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions.

Based on the Judicial Transparency Index Assessment (2019 and 2020) conducted in China by the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, this book summarizes and analyzes the current situation of judicial openness in China, using a sample of 218 courts across the country for the study. The book analyzes the ideological and institutional origins of judicial openness and examines the operation of judicial openness through the practical experience of role replacement. By analyzing evaluation data in the fields of audit information disclosure, trial information disclosure, judicial enforcement data disclosure, and judicial reform data disclosure, the book points out that the current judicial disclosure has made significant progress, but there are still problems such as unclear disclosure standards, insufficient rigidity in disclosure requirements, and the scope of disclosure still needs to be expanded. The book recommends accelerating the disclosure of judicial legislation, public standards, and strengthening assessment and accountability.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th China Conference on Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing: Knowledge Graph Empowers the Digital Economy, CCKS 2022,  in Qinhuangdao, China, August 24-27, 2022.The 15 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: knowledge representation and reasoning; knowledge acquisition and knowledge base construction; linked data, knowledge integration, and knowledge graph storage managements; natural language understanding and semantic computing; knowledge graph applications; and knowledge graph open resources.

This book offers a snapshot of interculturality as a complex, unstable and highly political object of research and education when it locates at the centre of multifaceted dialogues between teachers and students; students and students; teachers, students, scholars and readers. The context of the book is a Chinese course on intercultural communication education where students engage with local and international teachers. By listening to the intriguing and stimulating voices of these students in dialogue with the teachers, the reader also has the opportunity to enter the intercultural world of Chinese youth, beyond stereotypes. The unique approach proposed in the book is of interest to students, teachers of intercultural communication education, teacher educators, researchers and anyone wishing to build up supercriticality in relation to the fascinating notion of interculturality. The book contains 15 chapters and revolves around five main dialogues between the students and their teachers. Following each dialogue, the floor is given to the students to react to the dialogues and to share their views on questions that emerged from the main dialogues. The book conveys the authors' excitement about approaching interculturality in supercritical ways, engaging in the process with multiple voices.

This book uncovers the crucial issues in learning technologies in this digital transformation moment, specifically within the COVID-19 umbrella effects. Remote learning, educational technologies, or distance learning are usually used topics by teachers, students, and researchers because the educational context should be transformed and even reinvented itself drastically. Technologies have been used more intensively in the last year than during the last decade. However, what is the effect of these "e;new"e; technologies on the teaching and learning methodologies? Are teachers and students fully digital competent to integrate these technologies in their teaching and learning activities? In this book, the authors claim to go forward that the online teaching conception to replicate the face-to-face teaching through a camera. They propose adapting the active methodologies to the online or hybrid context, which is a challenge that must be corroborated with rigorous educational research.

Wineinformatics is a new data science application with a focus on understanding wine through artificial intelligence. Thousands of new wine reviews are produced monthly, which benefits the understanding of wine through wine experts for winemakers and consumers. This book systematically investigates how to process human language format reviews and mine useful knowledge from a large volume of processed data.This book presents a human language processing tool named Computational Wine Wheel to process professional wine reviews and three novel Wineinformatics studies to analyze wine quality, price and reviewers. Through the lens of data science, the author demonstrates how the wine receives 90+ scores out of 100 points from Wine Spectator, how to predict a wine's specific grade and price through wine reviews and how to rank a group of wine reviewers. The book also shows the advanced application of the Computational Wine Wheel to capture more information hidden in wine reviews and the possibility of extending the wheel to coffee, tea beer, sake and liquors.This book targets computer scientists, data scientists and wine industrial researchers, who are interested in Wineinformatics. Senior data science undergraduate and graduate students may also benefit from this book.

This book contains selected articles from the third International Conference on Geotechnical Engineering-Iraq 2022 (3ICGE-2022) held on May 29-31, 2022, at the University of Baghdad/Baghdad/Iraq. This proceeding discusses the latest research and studies in geotechnical engineering and all related topics in different fields such as civil engineering, environmental engineering, and architectural engineering. This book gives participants from both academics and industry a great chance to learn about recent developments in Geotechnical engineering fields.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data, SocialSec 2022, which took place in Xi'an, China, in October 2022.The 23 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers were evaluated on the basis of their significance, novelty, technical quality, as well as on their practical impact or their level of advancement of the field's foundations. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Cryptography and its applications; Network security and privacy protection; Data detection; Blockchain and its applications.

Incomplete big data are frequently encountered in many industrial applications, such as recommender systems, the Internet of Things, intelligent transportation, cloud computing, and so on. It is of great significance to analyze them for mining rich and valuable knowledge and patterns. Latent feature analysis (LFA) is one of the most popular representation learning methods tailored for incomplete big data due to its high accuracy, computational efficiency, and ease of scalability. The crux of analyzing incomplete big data lies in addressing the uncertainty problem caused by their incomplete characteristics. However, existing LFA methods do not fully consider such uncertainty.In this book, the author introduces several robust latent feature learning methods to address such uncertainty for effectively and efficiently analyzing incomplete big data, including robust latent feature learning based on smooth L1-norm, improving robustness of latent feature learning using L1-norm, improving robustness of latent feature learning using double-space, data-characteristic-aware latent feature learning, posterior-neighborhood-regularized latent feature learning, and generalized deep latent feature learning. Readers can obtain an overview of the challenges of analyzing incomplete big data and how to employ latent feature learning to build a robust model to analyze incomplete big data. In addition, this book provides several algorithms and real application cases, which can help students, researchers, and professionals easily build their models to analyze incomplete big data.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Human Brain and Artificial Intelligence, HBAI 2022, held in conjunction with IJCAI-ECAI 2022, Vienna, Austria, on July 23, 2022. The 19 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers present most recent research in the fields of brain-inspired computing, brain-machine interfaces, computational neuroscience, brain-related health, neuroimaging, cognition and behavior, learning, and memory, neuron modulation, and closed-loop brain stimulation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems, ACIIDS 2022, held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in November 2022.  This volume contains 60 peer-reviewed papers selected for poster presentation from 406 submissions. Papers included in this volume cover the following topics: data mining and machine learning methods, advanced data mining techniques and applications, intelligent and contextual systems, natural language processing, network systems and applications, computational imaging and vision, decision support and control systems, and data modeling and processing for industry 4.0.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th China Conference on Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing Evaluations, CCKS 2022, which took place in Qinhuangdao, China, in August 2022. The 25 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. CCKS technology evaluation track aims to provide researchers with platforms and resources for testing knowledge and semantic computing technologies, algorithms and systems, promote the technical development in the field of domestic knowledge, and the integration of academic achievements and industrial needs.

Life imprisonment is the punishment most often imposed worldwide for what societies regard as the most serious offences. Yet, in Asia the phenomenon has never been studied systematically. Life Imprisonment in Asia fills this major gap. It brings together thirteen new essays on life imprisonment in key jurisdictions in the region. Each chapter consolidates what is known about the law and practice of life imprisonment in the jurisdiction and then explores aspects of the imposition or implementation of life sentences that the authors regard as particularly problematic. In some instances, the main issue is the imposition of life sentences by the courts and their relationship to the death penalty. In others, the focus is on the treatment of life sentenced prisoners. In many instances, the most prominent question is whether life sentenced prisoners should be released and, if so, according to what processes. In the overview chapter, the editors place the complex picture that emerges of life imprisonment in Asia in a global context and point to reforms urgently required to ensure that Asian life sentences meet international human rights standards.Life Imprisonment in Asia should be read by everyone who has an interest in just punishments for serious offences, not only in Asia, but throughout the world. It will be an invaluable tool for lawyers, criminologists, policy makers and penal reform advocates in the region and beyond.    

The book presents selected papers at the 9th Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT) held virtually in June 2022, organized by Zhejiang University, China. CSMT is a multidisciplinary conference focusing on audio processing and understanding with bias on music and acoustic signals. The primary aim of the conference is to promote the collaboration between art society and technical society in China. In this book, the paper included covers a wide range topic from speech, signal processing, music understanding, machine learning, and signal processing for advanced medical diagnosis and treatment applications, which demonstrates the target of CSMT merging arts and science research together. Its content caters to scholars, researchers, engineers, artists, and education practitioners not only from academia but also industry, who are interested in audio/acoustics analysis signal processing, music, sound, and artificial intelligence (AI).