This completely updated and revised second edition provides a unique and up-to-date treatment of all aspects of plant ecology, making it an ideal textbook and reference work for students, researchers and practitioners. More than 500 high-quality images and drawings, mostly in colour, aid readers’ understanding of various key topics, while the clear structure and straightforward style make it user friendly and particularly useful for students. Written by leading experts, it offers authoritative information, including relevant references. While Plant Ecology primarily addresses graduate students in biology and ecology, it is also a valuable resource for post-graduate students and researchers in botany, environmental sciences and landscape ecology, as well as all those whose study or work touches on agriculture, forestry, land use, and landscape management. Key Topics: - Molecular ecophysiology (molecular stress physiology: light, temperature, oxygen deficiency, water deficit (drought), unfavorable soil mineral conditions, biotic stress) - Physiological and biophysical plant ecology (ecophysiology of plants: thermal balance, water, nutrient, carbon relations) - Ecosystem ecology (characteristics of ecosystems, approaches how to study and how to model terrestrial ecosystems, biogeochemical fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems) - Community ecology and biological diversity (development of plant communities in time and space, interactions between plants and plant communities with the abiotic and the biotic environment, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning) - Global ecology (global biogeochemical cycles, Dynamic Global Vegetation Models, global change and terrestrial ecosystems)
The small town of Stone, Virginia is about to get the show of its life. The president is coming for an appearance, and his aids have a surprise. When a staged assassination plot starts to unravel, Millicent Van Horn, tries to clear her brother's name, and is pulled deeper into a deadly web of presidential deceit. Police Detective Van Horn finds herself investigating incidences she'd rather let lie, but there are too many lives at stake. Never realizing the lengths that would be taken to protect the president's name, Millicent embarks on an adventure to save her own life.
Stephan Joubert offers a new theoretical angle of incidence to Paul's collection by distinguishing between the basic interpretative framework within which the collection was conceptualized, and the various theological reflections on this project.
Since the appearance of its first edition in Germany in 1979, A History of German Literature has established itself as a classic work used by students and anyone interested in German literature. The volume chronologically traces the development of German literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Throughout this chronology, literary developments are set in a social and political context. This includes a final chapter, written for this latest edition, on the consequences of the reunification of Germany in 1990. Thoroughly interdiscipinary in method, the work also reflects recent developments in literary criticism and history. Highly readable and stimulating, A History of German Literature succeeds in making the literature of the past as immediate and engaging as the works of the present. It is both a scholary study and an invaluable reference work for students.
Why does an entire society believe that there are witches who must be burned? What roles did the emerging 'state', the professions of clerics and jurists, and the public involved play in each case? And how could this project be completed? From a sociological point of view, the findings of recent international research on witches provide a model of a more general, highly ambivalent, 'pastoral' attitude, according to which a shepherd has to care for the welfare of his flock as well as for its erring sheep. The first main part describes the clerical initial situation, which developed the 'Dominican' demonological model of witchcraft on the basis of the still dominant magico-religious mentality in the 15th century. A model, according to the second part of the book, which then in the course of the 16th century in Western Europe increasingly fell into the hands of the not so innocent jurists. From there it developed into a legal witch persecution that realized the early European witch model from the village witch to the mass persecutions to the late child witches. The third part describes how witch persecutions slowly became less important towards the end of the 17th century as a general witchcraft 'politics' game in the transition from a confessional state to a (court) 'civil service' state.
Kaum eine Epoche der Kunst ist von so durchgreifenden Veränderungen geprägt wie die Spätgotik im 15. Jahrhundert. Angeregt durch niederländische Vorbilder werden Licht und Schatten, Körper und Raum zunehmend wirklichkeitsnah dargestellt. Der Alltag hält Einzug in die Künste. Mit der Erfindung der Drucktechnik kommt es zu einer ungeahnten Verbreitung von Bildern und Texten. Künstler wie Nicolaus Gerhaert oder Martin Schongauer erlangen überregionale Berühmtheit und nehmen über alle Gattungen hinweg Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der Bildkünste in ganz Europa. Die Gegenüberstellung der unterschiedlichen Gattungen macht den Katalog zu einem Handbuch der Kunst am Übergang zur Neuzeit.
At the heart of developed societies lies an insatiable drive for wealth and prosperity. Yet in a world ruled by free-market economics, there are always winners and losers. The benefits enjoyed by the privileged few come at the expense of the many. In this important new book, Stephan Lessenich shows how our wealth and affluence are built overwhelmingly at the expense of those in less-developed countries and regions of the world. His theory of ‘externalization’ demonstrates how the negative consequences of our lifestyles are directly transferred onto the world’s poorest. From the destruction of habitats caused by the massive increase in demand for soy and palm oil to the catastrophic impact of mining, Lessenich shows how the Global South has borne the brunt of our success. Yet, as we see from the mass movements of people across the world, we can no longer ignore the environmental and social toll of our prosperity. Lessenich’s highly original account of the structure and dynamics of global inequality highlights the devastating consequences of the affluent lifestyles of the West and reminds us of our far-reaching political responsibilities in an increasingly interconnected world.
In the 1980s, traditional Business Intelligence (BI) systems focused on the delivery of reports that describe the state of business activities in the past, such as for questions like "How did our sales perform during the last quarter?" A decade later, there was a shift to more interactive content that presented how the business was performing at the present time, answering questions like "How are we doing right now?" Today the focus of BI users are looking into the future. "Given what I did before and how I am currently doing this quarter, how will I do next quarter?" Furthermore, fuelled by the demands of Big Data, BI systems are going through a time of incredible change. Predictive analytics, high volume data, unstructured data, social data, mobile, consumable analytics, and data visualization are all examples of demands and capabilities that have become critical within just the past few years, and are growing at an unprecedented pace. This book introduces research problems and solutions on various aspects central to next-generation BI systems. It begins with a chapter on an industry perspective on how BI has evolved, and discusses how game-changing trends have drastically reshaped the landscape of BI. One of the game changers is the shift toward the consumerization of BI tools. As a result, for BI tools to be successfully used by business users (rather than IT departments), the tools need a business model, rather than a data model. One chapter of the book surveys four different types of business modeling. However, even with the existence of a business model for users to express queries, the data that can meet the needs are still captured within a data model. The next chapter on vivification addresses the problem of closing the gap, which is often significant, between the business and the data models. Moreover, Big Data forces BI systems to integrate and consolidate multiple, and often wildly different, data sources. One chapter gives an overview of several integration architectures for dealing with the challenges that need to be overcome. While the book so far focuses on the usual structured relational data, the remaining chapters turn to unstructured data, an ever-increasing and important component of Big Data. One chapter on information extraction describes methods for dealing with the extraction of relations from free text and the web. Finally, BI users need tools to visualize and interpret new and complex types of information in a way that is compelling, intuitive, but accurate. The last chapter gives an overview of information visualization for decision support and text.
In the mountain of books that have been written about the Third Reich, surprisingly little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis' rise to power. While often confidently referred to, the 'fateful' role played by the German nobility is rarely, if ever, investigated in any real detail. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany's defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s. As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enough to take an active part in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. In a real twist of historical irony, members of the nobility were as prominent in the destruction of Weimar democracy as they were to be years later in Graf Stauffenberg's July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. In this skilful portrait of an aristocratic world that was soon to disappear, Malinowski gives us for the first time the in-depth story of the German nobility's social decline and political radicalization in the inter-war years - and the troubled mésalliance to which this was to lead between the majority of Germany's nobles and the National Socialists.
The book introduces the concept of encounter CONNECT-ED from the practice of working with the elderly to impart media skills and presents empirical data on the social participation and quality of life of the participants. The research results show the potential of the Internet for older people and open up perspectives for gender- and age-sensitive advanced training opportunities.
This comprehensive, but practical, reference is an informative guide to the management of acute respiratory problems in the hospital setting. Evaluation of the patient with breathing difficulties is often challenging, since the differential diagnosis is broad and the use of the wrong treatment can exacerbate the problem. This book helps the practis
This book provides an overview of recent developments in experiments probing the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states of the second Landau level, especially the \nu=5/2 state. It summarizes the state-of-the-art understanding of these FQH states. It furthermore describes how the properties of the FQH states can be probed experimentally, by investigating tunneling and confinement properties. The progress towards the realization of an experiment, allowing to probe the potentially non-Abelian statistics of the quasiparticle excitations at \nu=5/2 is discussed. The book is intended as a reference for graduate students, PostDocs and researchers starting in the field. The experimental part of this book gives practical advice for solving the experimental challenges which researchers studying highly fragile FQH states are faced with.
Combining economic, social-psychological and sociological approaches to trust, this book provides a general theoretical framework to causally explain conditional and unconditional trust; it also presents an experimental test of the corresponding integrative model and its predictions. Broadly, it aims at advancing a cognitive turn in trust research by highlighting the importance of (1) an actor ́s context-dependent definition of the situation and (2) the flexible and dynamic degree of rationality involved. In essence, trust is as “multi-faceted” as there are cognitive routes that take us to the choice of a trusting act. Therefore, variable rationality has to be incorporated as an orthogonal dimension to the typological space of trust. The theory presents an analytically tractable model; the empirical test combines trust games, high- and low-incentive conditions, framing manipulations, and psychometric measurements, and is complemented by decision-time analyses.
Collected Studies CS1071 The central figure in this volume is that of Gratian, whose monumental compilation of canon law sparked off the revival of legal studies in the medieval West. In other collections of essays, Stephan Kuttner dealt with the development of canon law in the two centuries that followed the publication of Gratian's Decretum, and the ideas that this engendered; here he is concerned with the foundations upon which all these later efforts were based. The work of Gratian is, of course, the principal focus, but the studies then follow the spread of the teaching of law, from its inception at Bologna in the 1140s to its appearance soon after in other centres of learning in the West especially in France, in the Anglo-Norman schools and in Germany. With a quarter of the volume consisting of additional notes and extensive indexes, it makes a contribution of the greatest importance to the historical study of canon law. For this second edition, a new section of additional notes has been supplied, and the volume is introduced with an essay by Peter Landau; these take account of the important recent work on Gratian and the Decretum and chart the significance of Stephan Kuttner's work.
From the 1960s onwards the clothing industry in the Neth- erlands and elsewhere in the European Union, experienced a deep crisis. Numerous firms went bankrupt and workers lost their jobs. Imports from low wage countries started providing the bulk of retailers' collections. However, in the 1980s a surprising development took place. In Amsterdam a substantial number of new small clothing firms mostly run by Turkish immigrants were established focusing on short-cycle production. During the 1990s most of these disappeared again. At the same time the import pattern changed to the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. Stephan Raes shows that the large retailers have become the most powerful players in the sector, and he places the developments against the background of transformations in the political economy of the Netherlands and Turkey. Stephan Raes is an economic anthropologist who currently works at the department of foreign economic relations of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands.
The authors bring a dual perspective—that of a practicing consultant and that of a professor of economics—to the complex strategic questions facing managers and corporate leaders who want their firms to get the most out of their investments in information technology. The information economy is built upon the myriad and sometimes unforeseen ways in which information technologies have become engines of productivity in themselves, rather than just fancy adjuncts. In explaining the rise of the information economy, the authors provide not only valuable context often missing from today's discussions but also a thorough understanding of the origination, development, and diffusion process of innovations. They also examine prevailing practices and implications for the future, including the potential pitfalls common to some information technology strategies. Relying on an underpinning of economic theory combined with heavy empirical analysis, Kudyba and Diwan describe the true nature of the information economy, paying as much attention to its particularities as to its more profound implications. How is information technology being implemented across industry sectors, and how can it be harnessed to improve overall firm-level productivity? How have innovations in high technology impacted e-commerce? Which e-commerce strategies prevail, and what can be expected of them? How can traditional economic theory help managers evaluate such in-vogue strategies as customer relationship management, market exchanges, and supply chain management? The authors answer these questions and more, including one of the most vexing in the short history of e-commerce: What led to the demise of so many technology stocks and dot-coms following the spring 2000 Nasdaq plunge, and what are the longer-term prospects for e-business?
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