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This unique textbook explicitly addresses the intersection of advanced analytics and procurement. It is motivated by one core question: How can firms generate (economic) value from procurement data? It demonstrates that procurement is one of the major functions within a firm where data analytics, artificial intelligence, and operations research can successfully be leveraged to reduce cost and risk and to achieve resilience and sustainability goals.The book provides a methods-based overview of data-driven optimization of purchasing decisions. Besides presenting key concepts and applications, it particularly focuses on implementation, so as to help (future) procurement managers and data scientists quickly evaluate the value generated by a given data-driven solution. What sets this textbook apart is its combination of rigorous, state-of-the-art methodologies from academic research and first-hand experience from various application-oriented consulting projects in a range ofindustries. Though primarily intended for graduate students with a major in procurement and supply chain management, the book will also benefit purchasing managers with and without specific knowledge of advanced analytics techniques, and data scientists with and without specific experience in procurement.

This book explores the queer history of the easternmost provinces of the German Reich¿regions that used to be German, but which now mostly belong to Poland¿in the first third of the twentieth century, a period roughly corresponding to the duration of Germany's first queer movement (1897-1933). While the amount of queer historical studies examining entire towns and cities in the German Reich has grown to an impressive size since the 1990s, most of that research concerns, firstly, the usual, large metropoles such as Berlin, Hamburg or Cologne, and, secondly, municipalities located in Germany 'proper'; that is, within its modern borders, not those of the German state in the first half of the twentieth century. Smaller cities (not to mention rural areas) in particular have received very little scholarly attention. This book is therefore one of the first to examine queer history¿that of spaces, culture, sociability and political groups specifically¿from this geographical perspective.

This book explores the symbiotic relationship that exists between African spirituality and ethics. Felix Murove discusses how these two concepts are entwined, and illustrates how they play a role in applied ethical issues. He argues that the general understanding of spirituality in Africa stems from Christianity, which has had a negative impact on African indigenous spirituality. The conceptual tools that run throughout the book are considerably Afro-centric, a methodological strategy which inevitably requires the reader to adopt some prior willingness to learn these Afro-centric concepts without easily resorting to western Christian and philosophical categories of thought. The book advocates for an Afro-centric conceptualization of spirituality and ethics, and encourages the reader to adopt a more holistic approach to African spirituality.

This book analyses the evolution of literary and artistic representations of the soul, exploring its development through different time periods. The volume combines literary, aesthetic, ethical, and political considerations of the soul in texts and works of art from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, spanning cultures and schools of thought. Drawing on philosophical, religious and psychological theories of the soul, it emphasizes the far-reaching and enduring epistemological function of the concept in literature, art and politics. The authors argue that the concept of the soul has shaped the understanding of human life and persistently irrigated cultural productions. They show how the concept of soul was explored and redefined by writers and artists, remaining relevant even as it became removed from its ancient or Christian origins.

This book explores current and future trends in adopting intelligent technologies, such as the metaverse, social technologies, FinTech applications, and blockchain, among individuals and organizations. The edited book includes empirical and review studies primarily focusing on these issues. This focus aids scholars in conducting future research in the domain and identifying possible future developments of emerging technologies. The empirical studies in the book utilize recent and advanced analytical techniques for data analysis.

This book explores how New Zealand, a small country almost as far from Western Europe as it is possible to be, assumed political importance in Britain¿s accession to the European Community vastly out of proportion to its size, proximity and strategic position. At several points in accession negotiations, the issue of New Zealand¿s continued trade with Britain threatened to derail UK Government attempts to join the Community. This issue also interacted with the broader context of the Cold War, economic shocks and decolonisation, materially affecting the terms of entry into the European Community, and altering Britain¿s relations with its European partners and the British public¿s perceptions of British membership. After entry, New Zealand continued to resurface as a continued source of tension between Britain and an integrating Europe. The role that New Zealand played sheds light on Britain¿s attempts to retain global influence after the demise of its formal empire. Contributing to a growing body of research which challenges the traditional historical narratives of British ¿decline¿ and colonial ¿independence¿ in the second half of the twentieth century, this book fills an important gap in the historiography of Britain following the 1973 enlargement of the European Communities.

This book presents a set of models, methods, and techniques that allow the successful implementation of data governance (DG) in an organization and reports real experiences of data governance in different public and private sectors.To this end, this book is composed of two parts. Part I on ¿Data Governance Fundamentals¿ begins with an introduction to the concept of data governance that stresses that DG is not primarily focused on databases, clouds, or other technologies, but that the DG framework must be understood by business users, systems personnel, and the systems themselves alike. Next, chapter 2 addresses crucial topics for DG, such as the evolution of data management in organizations, data strategy and policies, and defensive and offensive approaches to data strategy. Chapter 3 then details the central role that human resources play in DG, analysing the key responsibilities of the different DG-related roles and boards, while chapter 4 discusses the most common barriers to DG in practice. Chapter 5 summarizes the paradigm shifts in DG from control to value creation. Subsequently chapter 6 explores the needs, characteristics and key functionalities of DG tools, before this part ends with a chapter on maturity models for data governance. Part II on ¿Data Governance Applied¿ consists of five chapters which review the situation of DG in different sectors and industries. Details about DG in the banking sector, public administration, insurance companies, healthcare and telecommunications each are presented in one chapter.The book is aimed at academics, researchers and practitioners (especially CIOs, Data Governors, or Data Stewards) involved in DG. It can also serve as a reference for courses on data governance in information systems.

This book explores a heretofore unremarked linkage between Bernard Shaw, the twentieth-century French thinker Paul Ricoeur, and Jesus of Nazareth. The ties that bind them are a foundational interest in the social teachings of the Nazarene and their use of a shared dialectics with respect to living the kind of compassionate life that holds out the promise in our contemporary world of achieving something approximating universal wellness on a healthy planet at peace with itself. This work argues that the three principal subjects of the study¿independently of one another¿used the same dialectical method to reach the same dialectically derived conclusion about how humans can live redemptively in a fractured world.

This book describes a novel approach to the study of Siegel modular forms of degree two with paramodular level. It introduces the family of stable Klingen congruence subgroups of GSp(4) and uses this family to obtain new relations between the Hecke eigenvalues and Fourier coefficients of paramodular newforms, revealing a fundamental dichotomy for paramodular representations. Among other important results, it includes a complete description of the vectors fixed by these congruence subgroups in all irreducible representations of GSp(4) over a nonarchimedean local field.Siegel paramodular forms have connections with the theory of automorphic representations and the Langlands program, Galois representations, the arithmetic of abelian surfaces, and algorithmic number theory. Providing a useful standard source on the subject, the book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the above fields.

This open access book constitutes papers from the research workshops presented at XP 2022 and XP 2023, respectively the 23rd and 24th International Conferences on Agile Software Development, held on June 13-17, 2022 at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark and June 13-16, 2023 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice. It is a unique forum where agile researchers, practitioners, thought leaders, coaches, and trainers get together to present and discuss their most recent innovations, research results, experiences, concerns, challenges, and trends. XP conferences provide an informal environment to learn and trigger discussions and welcome both people new to agile and seasoned agile practitioners.In 2022, the following workshops took place: ¿ 3rd International Workshop on Agility with Microservices Programming¿ 2nd International Workshop on Agile Sustainability¿ Agile and EducationIn 2023, six workshops were held: ¿ Workshop on Organisational Debt and Large-Scale Agile¿ Workshop on Software-Intensive Business¿ Workshop on Global and Hybrid Work¿ Workshop on Fear-Based Agile Transformation¿ Workshop on AI-assisted Agile¿ Workshop on Agile-Quantum Software EngineeringIn 2022, 6 workshop papers were accepted for publication in these post-proceedings, out of 11 submissions, and in 2023, 15 papers were accepted for publication out of 38 submissions.

This book contains the papers selected by the Scientific Committee and represented at the XIII International Conference "Solar-Terrestrial Relations and Physics of Earthquake Precursors", which was hold at the Institute of Cosmophysical Research and Radio Wave Propagation, Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Kamchatka. The papers describe the investigation results in the fields of atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetosphere physics. Mechanisms of transformation of solar wind energy into the energy of magnetospheric-ionospheric processes, effects of the processes in the Earth core on the lower and upper atmosphere, seismo-electromagnetic, seismo-electric and seismo-acoustic effects at different frequency ranges in the Earth crust, atmosphere and ionosphere are under consideration. Modern methods for geophysical data collection, processing, transfer and exchange as well as organisation issues of seismic activity monitoring are presented.The Conference "Solar-Terrestrial Relations and Physics of Earthquake Precursors" has 25 years of history. Scientists from Russia, Japan, Hungary, China, India, USA and other countries participate in it. In a traditional way, the Conference includes three sections: atmosphere physics, geophysical fields and their interaction, physics of earthquake precursors.

This book brings together several strands of medieval and medievalist work in the history of emotions, with a focus on literary, historical and cinema studies. It asks how we may best ¿face up¿ to work that has been done already in these fields, and speculates about work that might yet be done, especially by medievalists working across medieval and postmedieval sources. In the idiom ¿facing up,¿ its editors evoke the impulse to assess and realize the place of medieval studies in the burgeoning field of emotions research. Conceptually, psychologically, and artistically, the face is perceived as being at the forefront of many human interactions and emotional practices ¿ as such, the face is not only a powerful conceptual site for theorizing human relationships, past and present, or a site for the representation of emotion: it is itself a catalyst for feeling. As such, the contributions gathered here provide a cutting-edge reflection on the history of medieval emotions.

This book bridges the gap between physical foundations and medical applications of the NMR and MRI technologies, making them accessible to both physicists and biomedical scientists. The physical basis of these technologies is discussed in a manner that can be easily understood by scientists from different backgrounds, aiding them in gaining a clearer understanding of the subject.. For instance, the medical applications of NMR and MRI technologies are described in a way that is accessible to physicists. Moreover, geometrical descriptions and specific mathematical tools are used to facilitate the visualizations of many concepts. Furthermore, the book covers modern technologies such as hyperpolarization and several other state-of-the-art techniques, along with their foundations.

This book considers how to conceive of the group of islands known in our time as the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages. Was the archipelago considered one geographical unit? Was it an it, or were the islands a they? Singular or plural? Contributions consider possible paths to thinking about late-medieval archipelagism, and in doing so, highlight the inconsistencies and contradictions in medieval (and modern) conceptions of the region.

This book gathers essays on premodern plants, considering the position of critical plant studies in relation to medieval studies. Contributions cover topics including the significance of the daisy in the two Prologues to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; naming in premodern herbals; gathering prayers; vegetal decay in the prose romance Perceforest; the futurity of plants as they ripen and then rot; and vegetal life in libertine science and literature from the seventeenth century. Taken together, they provide a thoughtful reflection on premodern plants.

This book explains the basic principles of recycling and circularity in textiles. With the emergence of "quick fashion," textile manufacturing has expanded significantly over the past few decades. The importance of textiles to human society goes beyond their practical uses in providing warmth, protection, and comfort. Therefore, the usage and production of textiles are enhanced substantially compared to the past globally. As a result, rates of textile production and trash output have grown drastically. The other side of the story is the drastic rate at which they are dumped into landfills which is almost a garbage truck every second. If this alarming trend continues, there will be serious environmental consequences. It is well known that the textile sector is recognized as the second largest industrial polluter in the world, producing 20% of the global wastewater and accounting for 10% of carbon emissions. Additionally, harmful chemicals are utilized and emitted during the manufacture of textiles, which has an impact on ecosystems and public health The last 150 years of the textile industrial system fundamentally follow the "take-make-dispose" principle, in which resources are continuously taken out of a natural system (take), changed during production (make), and used for various purposes within the human system (use), and then released back into the environment (dispose of). In this way, manufacturing industries produce waste-producing commodities to make money, which eventually has a negative impact leading to the lack of resources resulting in price volatility, uncertainty, and economic crises. This book consists of 11 potential chapters to cover all the aspects of ¿circularity in textiles.¿

This book offers the latest research on formation of modern workers in the context of digitalization: from constant improvement of new training technologies to growing requirements for employees in workplace, as well as an assessment of specialists' digital skills and dynamics of changes over the past years. The book proposes to look at the pool of these problems through the prism of acquisition of new digital competencies and requirements for a modern worker.This book is intended for both young and experienced scientists who want to get acquainted with latest trends and data to use them in their research.

¿This book examines the under-researched field of communication by bilingual people with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). The aging population is increasingly affected by neurocognitive diseases such as DAT, and over the past 30 years, the growing research body concerned with monolingual DAT discourses has seen significant growth. The findings from monolingual studies and institutional settings highlight the importance of code choice for a person¿s sense of autonomy, especially against the background of changing communicational abilities. Adding a new perspective, this book investigates how ten Puerto Rican speakers living with varying stages of DAT draw on their bilingual resources to accomplish verbal interaction in informal settings with their primary care partners. Drawing on narrative interviews conducted in Orlando, Florida, this multi-case study investigates situated language choices and code-switches by applying the ethno-social approach, i.e. combining features of conversation analysis and ethnography of communication. The author sheds light both on the question of how people living with DAT engage in conversations and which strategies they employ in their languages (English and Spanish) to reach their communicative goals. Specifically, by analyzing the role of code choice and code-switching in a qualitative manner, two main functional categories emerge: discourse-related and participant-related code-switching. Bilingual competencies remain even among participants living with severe DAT symptoms, as evident in retained interactional sequences such as salutations. Persons living with DAT competently negotiate code, either through exploratory code-switching or metalinguistic commentary, emphasizing the need for conversational partners to be sensitive to the communicative needs, in both languages, of speakers living with DAT. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working on dementia discourses, health communication, multilingualism and ageing, as well as Bilingual/ Multilingual families or individuals living with dementia.

This short book discusses the relatively new concept of project-based leisure in leisure research, and relates it to individual and community well-being and quality of life. The book defines PBL as a short-term, reasonably complicated, one-off or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time, or time free of disagreeable obligation. Such leisure requires considerable planning, effort, and sometimes skill or knowledge. The book discusses how PBL contributes to subjective well-being, though doing so more modestly than serious leisure and occupational devotion. The book surveys existing field research of the author¿s own and other studies, and provides original insights on how PBL activities can be used to generate community involvement and subjective well-being.

¿This book is the first sustained scholarly account of women and goddesses in presocratic philosophy. It approaches the origin of western philosophy via Nietzsche, Feminism, and Embodied Cognition in order to argue that the presocratics were reviving, within the largely patriarchal and death-glorifying culture of archaic Greece, a paleo/neolithic goddess-centered religiosity that affirmed life and rebirth. By taking readers from prehistoric Europe to classical Athens, Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr. provides a novel narrative of the dawn of western philosophy which is more comprehensive than traditional accounts and which helps us address contemporary problems¿the patriarchal attitudes and ideas that continue to corrupt academic-philosophical culture; the fascist-dominator lifestyle that continues to threaten western democracy and which is encouraged by the patriarchal aspects of academia; and the consumerism that continues to result from a materialistic-secular paradigm that is being increasingly recognized as both intellectually untenable and socially unsustainable.

This book focuses on some important aspects of Physics Education: the role of metaphors in Physics teaching and learning, the connections between Physics and Mathematics, the interaction of young children with Physics at the primary level, and recent developments in teacher education in the USA. Contributors present their research related to: ¿ Preparing teachers for TPACK (technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge) and laboratory work. ¿ Developing and evaluating teacher PCK (pedagogical content knowledge) in Quantum Mechanics. ¿ In-service Physics teacher education for early childhood and primary levels. ¿ Pre-service Physics teacher education at all levels. ¿ In-service Physics teacher professional learning for second and higher-level education. Chapters in this book inevitably look into how Physics teacher education is organizedin different countries. Suggestions are offered for possible ways of supporting Physics teachers¿ learning. An emphasis is made on the much-needed measurements of the effectiveness of different teaching strategies that improve teaching for learning.All this should help professionals, researchers, and pre-service, as well as in-service teachers to get acquainted with the most recent research contributions in the field.

This book project studies the variation of sovereignty in international order by analysing how the general model of sovereignty is localised in the political practice of two major non-Western rising powers, namely China and India. It aims to investigate how the sovereignty of these states is constituted, which includes the question of how sovereignty works and becomes constituted in specific contexts and cases that fall outside the discourses and positions of the so-called Westphalian (conservative, absolutist) sovereignty that is dominantly advocated by these two states on a global level. The core of this project explores specific contested cases and situates them vis-à-vis the broader approaches of China and India to sovereignty. I specifically analyse four particular cases: Chinäs approach to sovereignty in relation to Hong Kong and Taiwan and Indiäs approach to sovereignty in relation to Bhutan and Kashmir. In doing so, I will illustrate that sovereignty is a flexible and plasticphenomenon which can be intertwined with principles, models or practices that are usually seen as divergent from or contradicting sovereignty; for example, those that derive from Chinäs and Indiäs imperial and colonial history.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Conference, IN4PL 2023, held in Rome, Italy, during November 15-17, 2023The 11 full papers and the 13 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. The book focuses on research and development involving innovative methods, software and hardware, whereby intelligent systems are applied to industrial production and logistics. This is currently related to the concept of industry 4.0 - an expression reflecting the trend towards automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies and processes which include cyber-physical systems, the industrial internet of things, industrial robotics, cloud computing, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence.

This book presents the case for legal protection for animals based on humanity¿s shared interests and destinies with the animal kingdom. To underscore the urgent need for legal reform, the book documents how animals are in crisis, with separate discussions on animals in entertainment, research, fashion, the food industry, and animals in our homes, as well as issues that impact wildlife and aquatic animals. In each of the foregoing areas, there is a discussion of major developments for animals across the globe, the objective being to demonstrate how the U.S. is out of step with other major countries in its legal treatment of animals. The importance of media as a driver of change is also considered. This background culminates to the heart of the book, which discusses and analyzes the link between human rights and animal rights, with nine areas explored (e.g., loss of biodiversity; environmental destruction; zoonotic diseases; world hunger; violence). Challengesto legal reforms are also explored, including issues associated with weak laws, the failure to enforce existing laws, and governmental agencies that tend to overlook the actions of industries. Finally, the book explores the development of animal law and the trajectory of current laws, with analysis of developing ¿rights of nature¿ laws and ¿legal personhood¿ status for animals.

This book keeps an eye in the direction of applications of advanced and high performance scientific computing in describing the behavior of natural and constructed systems, e.g. chaos, bifurcation, fractal, Lyapunov exponent, period doubling, Poincaré map, strange attractor etc. With the aid of powerful computers the modem theory of chaos and its geometry, the fractals, and attractors are developed. The concepts of object oriented computing are introduced early in the text and steadily expanded as one progresses through the chapters. The beginning of each chapter is of an introductory nature, followed by practical applications, the discussion of numerical results, theoretical investigations on nonlinear stability and convergence.This is the first complete introduction to process modelling and computing that fully integrates software tools ¿ enabling professionals and students to master critical techniques hands on through computer simulations based on the popular MATLAB environment. The book offers a simple tool for all those oscillations that are travelling through the world, helping them discover its hidden beauty.Many applications as well as results of computer simulations are presented. The center of concern is set on existing as well as emerging continuous methods of investigations useful for researchers, engineers and practitioners active in many and often interdisciplinary fields, where physics, electrochemistry, biology and medicine play a key role. Coverage includes:¿ Dynamic behavior of nonlinear systems,¿ Fundamental descriptions of processes exhibiting nonlinear oscillations,¿ Mechanism and function of structures of nonlinear oscillations¿ patterns,¿ Analysis of dynamical oscillations in electric circuits and systems,¿ Artificial intelligence models of natural systems,¿ Nonlinear oscillations in chemistry, biologyand medicine,¿ Oscillations in mechanics and transport systems,¿ Oscillations in fractional-order systems,¿ Energy harvesting systems from the surrounding environment.With an insatiable appetite for exploring the surrounding world and doing research, this book can help readers quickly find ways to use new computers and facilitate the quest for greater knowledge and understanding of reality. The reach of novelty of the book ranges from new mathematical ideas to motivating questions and science issues in many subject areas.

This edited book is based on the accepted papers for presentation at the 1st MedGU Annual Meeting, Istanbul 2021. With four parts spanning a large spectrum of geological, geochemical, geophysical and petroleum topics, this book presents a series of newest research studies that are nowadays relevant to Middle East, Mediterranean region, and Africa.The book covers various topics from the fields of (1) sedimentology, stratigraphy, paleontology, (2) geochemistry, mineralogy, petrology, volcanology, (3) structural geology, tectonics, geodynamics, and (4) petroleum and energy engineering, and petroleum geology. The content of these papers provides new scientific knowledge for further understanding new case studies and approaches in these various topics.