Human tissue and biobank research is of increasing importance for understanding the causes of widespread diseases and developing effective therapies. However, while the success of biobank research depends on the availability of a large number of samples and the consolidation of collections across country borders is very desirable from the perspective of researchers, the legal and ethical requirements for the procurement, storage and use of human tissue samples are rather heterogeneous across different countries. Moreover, the lack of comprehensive supranational regulation on human tissue and biobanking can be seen as posing a serious threat to transnational biomedical research. Against this background, it was one of the aims of the EU-funded Tiss.EU project ('Evaluation of Legislation and Related Guidelines on the Procurement, Storage and Transfer of Human Tissues and Cells in the European Union--an Evidence-Based Impact Analysis') to analyse the ethical and legal regulation of human tissue and biobank research across the 27 European Member States plus Switzerland. The results of nine international workshops and three conferences are gathered in this volume. While the country reports evaluate the implementation of ethical and legal guidelines at a national level, point out their strengths and deficits, and, where required, create an evidence base for the revision of said legislation, the conference reports address more general ethical and legal issues in this field. The volume is completed by a final presentation of project's results"--Publisher's description
Divided into three parts, this edited volume gives an overview of current topics in law and ethics in relation to intellectual property. It addresses practical issues encountered in everyday situations in politics, research and innovation, as well as some of the underlying theoretical concepts. In addition, it provides an insight into the process of international policy-making, showing the current problems in the area of intellectual property in science and research. It also highlights changes in the fundamental understanding of common and private property and the possible implications and challenges for society and politics.
How could one define health and disease? On what presuppositions, and ought we look for such definitions? Does quality of life inherit a subjective or objective evaluation? Are health and quality of life culture dependent concepts? Under the conditions of technologically advanced medicine and the common tendency towards a hedonistic lifestyle such questions come into focus. Hence, one question is of special relevance: which role does health play in our quality of life? The contributions of this interdisciplinary volume aim at the clarification of the various concepts in use. International scholars and scientists outline the framework for a more comprehensive and demanding concept of health and quality of life including philosophical and cultural aspects as well as medical and psychological dimensions.
The research field of biobanks and tissue research is highly promising. Many projects around the globe are involved in the collection of human tissue and health data for research purposes. These initiatives are driven by the perspective of decisive breakthroughs in the knowledge of the genetic pathways involved in widespread diseases. However, there are considerable ethical and legal challenges to be considered as well. These challenges encompass the use of body material for research purposes, the misuse of genetic and other health data by third parties, trust in science and medicine, concerns regarding privacy, use of genetic data for forensic applications by the state and the police, and regulatory issues. This volume is divided into three parts: the inclusion of the public, the rights of donors and patients, examples and recommendations for the future of tissue research. It presents a comprehensive overview of the most important topics in the field by renowned scholars in medical ethics and biolaw.
This reader of texts from the influential 19th-century theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) brings together a selection of texts in English translation from across Baur's wide range of exegetical, historical, philosophical and theological expertise. In these excerpts, including many translated for the first time, readers gain a comprehensive overview of Baur's output and his remarkable role in the shaping of modern scholarly discourse in his fields. Beginning with a full scholarly introduction, and extensively annotated texts, readers are introduced to Baur's bold and controversial historical hypotheses and encounter the variety of intellectual and stylistic registers he used, from the purely scholarly to the sharply polemical. The editors also explore the ways in which Baur was instrumental in some of the most fundamental intellectual paradigm shifts of the 19th-century, including the radical historicization of Christian theology and its interaction with Schelling, Hegel, and the German Idealist tradition.
Divided into three parts, this edited volume gives an overview of current topics in law and ethics in relation to intellectual property. It addresses practical issues encountered in everyday situations in politics, research and innovation, as well as some of the underlying theoretical concepts. In addition, it provides an insight into the process of international policy-making, showing the current problems in the area of intellectual property in science and research. It also highlights changes in the fundamental understanding of common and private property and the possible implications and challenges for society and politics.
Human tissue and biobank research is of increasing importance for understanding the causes of widespread diseases and developing effective therapies. However, while the success of biobank research depends on the availability of a large number of samples and the consolidation of collections across country borders is very desirable from the perspective of researchers, the legal and ethical requirements for the procurement, storage and use of human tissue samples are rather heterogeneous across different countries. Moreover, the lack of comprehensive supranational regulation on human tissue and biobanking can be seen as posing a serious threat to transnational biomedical research. Against this background, it was one of the aims of the EU-funded Tiss.EU project ('Evaluation of Legislation and Related Guidelines on the Procurement, Storage and Transfer of Human Tissues and Cells in the European Union--an Evidence-Based Impact Analysis') to analyse the ethical and legal regulation of human tissue and biobank research across the 27 European Member States plus Switzerland. The results of nine international workshops and three conferences are gathered in this volume. While the country reports evaluate the implementation of ethical and legal guidelines at a national level, point out their strengths and deficits, and, where required, create an evidence base for the revision of said legislation, the conference reports address more general ethical and legal issues in this field. The volume is completed by a final presentation of project's results"--Publisher's description
An intellectual and cultural history of mid-twentieth century plans for European integration, this book calls into question the usual pre- and post-war periodizations that have structured approaches to twentieth-century European history. It focuses not simply on the ideas of leading politicians but analyses debates about Europe in “civil society” and the party-political sphere in Germany, asking if, and how, a “permissive consensus” was formed around the issue of integration. Taking Germany as its case study, the book offers context to the post-war debates, analysing the continuities that existed between interwar and post-war plans for European integration. It draws attention to the abiding scepticism of democracy displayed by many advocates of integration, indeed suggesting that groups across the ideological spectrum converged around support for European integration as a way of constraining the practice of democracy within nation-states.
In this timely exploration of sustainable actions, Christian Berg unpacks the complexity in understanding the barriers we face in moving towards a sustainable future, providing solution perspectives for every level, from individuals to governments and supra-national organizations offering a lucid vision of a long-term and achievable goal for sustainability. While the 2030 Agenda has already set ambitious targets for humanity, it offers little guidance for concrete actions. Although much is already being done, progress seems slow and some actions aiming at sustainability may be counterproductive. Different disciplines, societal actors, governmental departments and NGOs attribute the slow progress to a number of different causes, from the corruption of politicians to the wrong incentive structures. Sustainable Action surveys all the fields involved in sustainability to provide action principles which speak to actors of different kinds, not just those professionally mandated with such changes. It offers a road map to all those who might not constantly think about systems change but who are concerned and want to contribute to a sustainable future in a meaningful way. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability issues, as well as those looking for a framework for how to change their systems at work to impact the quadruple bottom line: environment, economy, society, and future generations.
This practical introduction focuses on how to design integrated solutions for industrial vision tasks from individual algorithms. The book is now available in a revised second edition that takes into account the current technological developments, including camera technology and color imaging processing. It gives a hands-on guide for setting up automated visual inspection systems using real-world examples and the NeuroCheck® standard software that has proven industrial strength integrated in thousands of applications in real-world production lines. Based on many years of experience in industry, the authors explain all the essential details encountered in the creation of vision system installations. With example material and a demo version of the software found on "extras.springer.com" readers can work their way through the described inspection tasks and carry out their own experiments.
Architects today must position themselves within an extremely wide-ranging field of qualifications. This makes it all the more important to have a fresh introduction to the field that makes up one of their core competences, the field of design. This introductory presentation describes and analyzes the theories, strategies, and tools of creative design for the purposes of practical work. With thoughtfulness and expertise, it opens the reader’s eyes to the processes that underlie design and demonstrates different ways of communicating about complex design work. The first section focuses on the much-discussed relationship between design and research, between architecture and the sciences. The second section describes basic design approaches, from Vitruvius and Alberti through Erwin Panofsky and Wolfgang Kemp to Otl Aicher and Vilém Flusser. The third and largest section presents the elementary tools of design, from gestures and words through drawings, models, and simulations to critique, all as instruments of creative design in architecture and its related fields.
Designing a new national map of urban topography for Switzerland. The classic volume Switzerland. An Urban Portrait was published in three languages by Birkhäuser Verlag in 2005 and has lost none of its relevance to this day. The result of several years of research by ETH Studio Basel, this three-volume work contains explorations of the multiple layers and facets of Swiss towns and cities by renowned architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron, and Christian Schmid, as well as possible and/or desirable scenarios for the future development of country’s main cities and its Alpine region. It also includes maps of urban topography. Leading Swiss architects examine Switzerland’s built environment An important contribution to the discussion of how Switzerland might look in the future Visionary urban topographies in a globalized world
This is an introduction to Bayesian statistics and decision theory, including advanced topics such as Monte Carlo methods. This new edition contains several revised chapters and a new chapter on model choice.
This book provides an open platform to establish and share knowledge developed by scholars, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, about various applications of the modeling and simulation in the design process of products, in various engineering fields. The book consists of 12 chapters arranged in two sections (3D Modeling and Virtual Prototyping), reflecting the multidimensionality of applications related to modeling and simulation. Some of the most recent modeling and simulation techniques, as well as some of the most accurate and sophisticated software in treating complex systems, are applied. All the original contributions in this book are jointed by the basic principle of a successful modeling and simulation process: as complex as necessary, and as simple as possible. The idea is to manipulate the simplifying assumptions in a way that reduces the complexity of the model (in order to make a real-time simulation), but without altering the precision of the results.
This is a print on demand book and is therefore non- returnable. This book provides a multi-disciplinary Christian analysis of the forces shaping the operation of modern technology, and offers an alternative framework of biblically rooted normative principles. It argues that technology is a value- laden activity and presents principles for basing it on God's will.
This volume comprises papers presented at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Joachim Wach's death, and the centennial of Mircea Eliade's birth. Its purpose is to reconsider both the problematic, separate legacies of these two major twentieth-century historians of religions, and the bearing of these two legacies upon each other. Shortly after Wach's death in 1955, Eliade succeeded him as the premiere historian of religions at the University of Chicago. As a result, the two have been associated with each other in many people's minds as the successive leaders of the so-called "Chicago School" in the history of religions. In fact, as this volume makes clear, there never was a monolithic Chicago School. Although Wach reportedly referred to Eliade as the most astute historian of religions of the day; the two never met, and their approaches to the study of religions differed significantly. Several dominant issues run through the essays collected here: the relationship between the two men's writings and their lives, and in Eliade's case, the relationship between his political commitments and his writings in fiction, history of religions, and autobiography. Both men's contributions to the field continue to provoke controversy and debate, and this volume sheds new light on these controversies and what they reveal about these two `scholars' legacies.
Mechanical Vibration and Shock Analysis, Second Edition Volume 4: Fatigue Damage Fatigue damage in a system with one degree of freedom is one of the two criteria applied when comparing the severity of vibratory environments. The same criterion is also employed for a specification representing the effects produced by the set of vibrations imposed in a real-world environment. In this volume, which is devoted to the calculation of fatigue damage, the author explores the various hypotheses and models used to describe the behavior of material suffering fatigue and the laws of fatigue accumulation. He also considers the methods of counting response peaks, which are used to establish a histogram when it is impossible to use the probability density of the peaks obtained with a Gaussian signal. The expressions for mean damage and its standard deviation are established and other hypotheses are tested. The Mechanical Vibration and Shock Analysis five-volume series has been written with both the professional engineer and the academic in mind. Christian Lalanne explores every aspect of vibration and shock, two fundamental and extremely significant areas of mechanical engineering, from both a theoretical and practical point of view. The five volumes cover all the necessary issues in this area of mechanical engineering. The theoretical analyses are placed in the context of both the real world and the laboratory, which is essential for the development of specifications.
This book evaluates the current worldwide state of knowledge about the interrelationship between emissions and air quality. This study describes the contribution of passenger car and commercial vehicle traffic to local and global emission situations, and the consequences for the environment.
Everything engineers need to know about mechanical vibration and shock...in one authoritative reference work! This fully updated and revised 3rd edition addresses the entire field of mechanical vibration and shock as one of the most important types of load and stress applied to structures, machines and components in the real world. Examples include everything from the regular and predictable loads applied to turbines, motors or helicopters by the spinning of their constituent parts to the ability of buildings to withstand damage from wind loads or explosions, and the need for cars to maintain structural integrity in the event of a crash. There are detailed examinations of underlying theory, models developed for specific applications, performance of materials under test conditions and in real-world settings, and case studies and discussions of how the relationships between these affect design for actual products. Invaluable to engineers specializing in mechanical, aeronautical, civil, electrical and transportation engineering, this reference work, in five volumes is a crucial resource for the solution of shock and vibration problems. This volume focuses on specification development in accordance with the principle of tailoring. Extreme response and the fatigue damage spectra are defined for each type of stress (sinusoidal vibration, swept sine, shock, random vibration, etc.). The process for establishing a specification from the life cycle profile of equipment which will be subject to these types of stresses is then detailed. The analysis takes into account the uncertainty factor, designed to cover uncertainties related to the real-world environment and mechanical strength, and the test factor, which takes account of the number of tests performed to demonstrate the resistance of the equipment.
The idea that there is such a thing as a human right to health has become pervasive. It has not only been acknowledged by a variety of international law documents and thus entered the political realm but is also defended in academic circles. Yet, despite its prominence the human right to health remains something of a mystery - especially with respect to its philosophical underpinnings. Addressing this unfortunate and intellectually dangerous insufficiency, this book critically assesses the stipulation that health is a human right which - as international law holds - derives from the inherent dignity of the human person. Scrutinising the concepts underlying this stipulation (health, rights, dignity), it shall conclude that such right cannot be upheld from a philosophical perspective.
The financial industry is swamped by credit products whose economic performance is linked to the performance of some underlying portfolio of credit-risky instruments, like loans, bonds, swaps, or asset-backed securities. Financial institutions continuously use these products for tailor-made long and short positions in credit risks. Based on a stead
Argumentation theory is a distinctly multidisciplinary field of inquiry. It draws its data, assumptions, and methods from disciplines as disparate as formal logic and discourse analysis, linguistics and forensic science, philosophy and psychology, political science and education, sociology and law, and rhetoric and artificial intelligence. This presents the growing group of interested scholars and students with a problem of access, since it is even for those active in the field not common to have acquired a familiarity with relevant aspects of each discipline that enters into this multidisciplinary matrix. This book offers its readers a unique comprehensive survey of the various theoretical contributions which have been made to the study of argumentation. It discusses the historical works that provide the background to the field and all major approaches and trends in contemporary research. Argument has been the subject of systematic inquiry for twenty-five hundred years. It has been graced with theories, such as formal logic or the legal theory of evidence, that have acquired a more or less settled provenance with regard to specific issues. But there has been nothing to date that qualifies as a unified general theory of argumentation, in all its richness and complexity. This being so, the argumentation theorist must have access to materials and methods that lie beyond his or her "home" subject. It is precisely on this account that this volume is offered to all the constituent research communities and their students. Apart from the historical sections, each chapter provides an economical introduction to the problems and methods that characterize a given part of the contemporary research program. Because the chapters are self-contained, they can be consulted in the order of a reader's interests or research requirements. But there is value in reading the work in its entirety. Jointly authored by the very people whose research has done much to define the current state of argumentation theory and to point the way toward more general and unified future treatments, this book is an impressively authoritative contribution to the field.
Although situations and atmospheres are omnipresent in organizations and have a significant influence on the behaviour of the members of the organization, they are only seldom regarded as relevant research subjects in management and organization research and systematically investigated. This book enters unknown territory in that it elevates situations and atmospheres to the most fundamental and everyday features of being-in-the-organization and investigates their development dynamics systematically. The new phenomenology of the German philosopher Hermann Schmitz, and critical supplements from his follower, Guido Rappe, serve as the theoretical foundation of the reflections. Human corporeality and subjectivity are at the centre of the reflections.
There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘inferior’ races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people. Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the ‘world of enemies’ which, in their view, threatened them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed, and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so destructive. The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.
In the Cold War era, sport was not just a symbol of the power and strength of a nation-state, but of certain ideological systems of politics. With the pressure for athletes to succeed at its zenith, many East German athletes were given anabolic steroids by their country’s own sport federation. While doping in East Germany has been intensely researched in the past decades, the state of West German athletics during this time has remained largely a mystery. In fact, doping was a common practice on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But how many athletes were involved? And who knew about these practices? In order to answer these questions, the Federal Institute for Sport Science in Germany supported a research project to shed light on the other, West German side of doping history. Based on analyses of authentic documents and archives, German Sports, Doping and Politics: A History of Performance Enhancement is a unique study spanning from 1950-2007. Translated from its original German, and supplemented with new material written especially for an international audience, this innovative book addresses many important questions about a topic with worldwide implications. Part I deals with the history of doping in the post-war period of the 1950s and ‘60s; Part II focuses on the apex of doping, as well as the beginnings of the anti-doping movement; and Part III considers the development of doping since the Reunification and the foundation of the World Anti-Doping Agency and the National Anti-Doping Agency in Germany. Written for a global audience, German Sports, Doping, and Politics explains and reveals the truly remarkable processes of doping and anti-doping that have evolved since the Cold War. While sports historians will find this book of great interest, it is also a significant study for anyone who wants to look beyond the surface of sports and doping as reported by the media.
During 1938 and 1939, Paul Neurath was a Jewish political prisoner in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He owed his survival to a temporary Nazi policy allowing release of prisoners who were willing to go into exile and the help of friends on the outside who helped him obtain a visa. He fled to Sweden before coming to the United States in 1941. In 1943, he completed The Society of Terror, based on his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald. He embarked on a long career teaching sociology and statistics at universities in the United States and later in Vienna until his death in September 2001. After liberation, the horrific images of the extermination camps abounded from Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places. Neurath's chillingly factual discussion of his experience as an inmate and his astute observations of the conditions and the social structures in Dachau and Buchenwald captivate the reader, not only because of their authenticity, but also because of the work's proximity to the events and the absence of influence of later interpretations. His account is unique also because of the exceptional links Neurath establishes between personal experience and theoretical reflection, the persistent oscillation between the distanced and sober view of the scientist and that of the prisoner.
Not all stress is stressful; instead, it appears that stress in the environment, below the mutation threshold, is essential for many subtle manifestations of population structures and biodiversity, and has played a substantial role in the evolution of life. Intrigued by the behavior of laboratory animals that contradicted our current understanding of stress, the author and his group studied the beneficial effects of stress on animals and plants. The seemingly “crazy” animals demonstrated that several stress paradigms are outdated and have to be reconsidered. The book describes the general stress responses in microorganisms, plants, and animals to abiotic and biotic, to natural and anthropogenic stressors. These stress responses include the activation of oxygen, the biotransformation system, the stress proteins, and the metal-binding proteins. The potential of stress response lies in the transcription of genes, whereas the actual response is manifested by proteins and metabolites. Yet, not all stress responses are in the genes: micro-RNAs and epigenetics play central roles. Multiple stressors, such as environmental realism, do not always act additively; they may even diminish one another. Furthermore, one stressor often prepares the subject for the next one to come and may produce extended lifespans and increased offspring numbers, thus causing shifts in population structures. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the ecological and evolutionary effects of stress.
This book focuses on technical safety, means of expanding the current procedures, and making the related risks more predictable. It identifies the ‘hidden commonalities’ of the various technical safety concepts and formulates a corresponding procedure, applicable across disciplines, in a single guideline. The future is now: we constantly face change through science, research and technologies, change through industrial development, and new innovations and complexities. Our society fundamentally depends on technical systems, infrastructures and interconnected smart components, in every corner of the human environment. And these systems bring with them the need for technical safety. The risks of extending what is technically feasible have to be identified and analyzed at an early stage so as to avoid and/or mitigate potential harm by means of appropriate countermeasures. Every technical field interprets technical safety in its own way. However, if a safety concept is to be comprehensively applied, it must be compatible with all technical fields – a challenge this book successfully addresses.
Intellectual traditions are commonly regarded as cultural variations, historical legacies, or path dependencies. By analyzing road junctions between different traditions of Public Administration this book contests the dominant perspective of path-dependent national silos, and highlights the ways in which they are hybrid and open to exogenous ideas. Analyzing the hybridity of administrative traditions from an historical perspective, this book provides a new approach to the history of Public Administration as a scientific discipline. Original and interdisciplinary chapters address the question of how scholars from the U.S., Germany and France mutually influenced each other, from the closing years of the 19th Century, up until the neo-liberal turn of the 1970s. Offering a thorough analysis of the transatlantic history of Public Administration, the conclusion argues that it is vital to learn from the past, in order to make Public Administration more realistic in theory, as well as more successful in practice. Advanced undergraduate and postgraduate political science scholars will find this to be a valuable tool in understanding the foundations of transatlantic Public Administration. This book will also greatly benefit researchers on comparative and transnational history with a keen interest in Public Administration.
Contains Nearly 100 Pages of New MaterialThe recent financial crisis has shown that credit risk in particular and finance in general remain important fields for the application of mathematical concepts to real-life situations. While continuing to focus on common mathematical approaches to model credit portfolios, Introduction to Credit Risk Modelin
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