Books on the topic 'Large-scale IoT network'

The monograph discusses theoretical and practical issues related to the completion of the implementation of the introduction of new forms of ownership in the formation of the railway holding JSC "Russian Railways". The organizational and economic results of the structural reform of railway transport in Russia are analyzed in comparison with the experience of modern reform of foreign railway transport. The variants of transformation of the modern cargo transportation management system in the new economic conditions are proposed.
 The main results of the study of modern economic and organizational conditions of cargo transportation, taking into account the specifics of working with a private car fleet, are presented. Based on a large-scale analysis of the loading dynamics of the main directions of the Russian Railways network and the resulting unevenness of operational work, new approaches are proposed for the formation of the market of freight operators of rolling stock.
 An economic assessment of the implementation of scenario options for the introduction of technological outsourcing is given on the example of JSC "Federal Freight Company" with the justification of a methodological approach for the formation of a consolidated fleet of wagons based
 on the algorithm of the cost method for calculating the throughput during the consolidation of a fleet of freight wagons.
 For practitioners and researchers involved in cargo transportation management, forecasting and formation of private fleets of freight cars. It will be useful for graduate students, undergraduates and students of economic faculties of railway universities when studying courses in the economics of railway transport and the cost of freight transportation.

From the late Sixties on, industrial development in Italy evolved through the spread of small and medium sized firms, aggregated in district networks, with an elevated propensity to enterprise and the marked presence of owner-families. Installed within the local systems, the industrial districts tended to simulate large-scale industry exploiting lower costs generated by factors that were not only economic. The districts are characterised in terms of territorial location (above all the thriving areas of the North-east and Centre) and sector, since they are concentrated in the "4 As" (clothing-fashion, home-decor, agri-foodstuffs, automation-mechanics), with some overlapping with "Made in Italy". How can this model be assessed? This is the crucial question in the debate on the condition and prospects of the Italian productive system between the supporters of its capacity to adapt and the critics of economic dwarfism. A dispassionate judgement suggests that the prospects of "small is beautiful" have been superseded, but that the "declinist" view, that sees only the dangers of globalisation and the IT revolution for our SMEs is risky. The concept of irreversible crisis that prevails at present is limiting, both because it is not easy either to "invent", or to copy, a model of industrialisation, and because there is space for a strategic repositioning of the district enterprises. The book develops considerations in this direction, showing how an evolution of the district model is possible, focusing on: gains in productivity, scope economies (through diversification and expansion of the range of products), flexibility of organisation, capacity to meld tradition and innovation aiming at product quality, dimensional growth of the enterprises, new forms of financing, active presence on the international markets and valorisation of the resources of the territory. It is hence necessary to reactivate the behavioural functions of the entrepreneurs.

Selective attention is essential for all aspects of cognition. Using the paradigmatic case of visual spatial attention, we present a theoretical account proposing the flexible control of attention through coordinated activity across a large-scale network of brain areas. It reviews evidence supporting top-down control of visual spatial attention by a distributed network, and describes principles emerging from a network approach. Stepping beyond the paradigm of visual spatial attention, we consider attentional control mechanisms more broadly. The chapter suggests that top-down biasing mechanisms originate from multiple sources and can be of several types, carrying information about receptive-field properties such as spatial locations or features of items; but also carrying information about properties that are not easily mapped onto receptive fields, such as the meanings or timings of items. The chapter considers how selective biases can operate on multiple slates of information processing, not restricted to the immediate sensory-motor stream, but also operating within internalized, short-term and long-term memory representations. Selective attention appears to be a general property of information processing systems rather than an independent domain within our cognitive make-up.

The life sciences are now a significant contributor to the ever expanding digital universe of data, and stand poised to lead in both the generation of big data and the realization of dramatic benefit from it. We can now score variations in DNA across whole genomes; RNA levels and alternative isoforms, metabolite levels, protein levels, and protein state information across the transcriptome, metabolome and proteome; methylation status across the methylome; and construct extensive protein–protein and protein–DNA interaction maps, all in a comprehensive fashion and at the scale of populations of individuals. This chapter describes a number of analytical approaches aimed at inferring causal relationships among variables in very large-scale datasets by leveraging DNA variation as a systematic perturbation source. The causal inference procedures are also demonstrated to enhance the ability to reconstruct truly predictive, probabilistic causal gene networks that reflect the biological processes underlying complex phenotypes like disease.

This chapter examines the challenge for entrepreneurial companies of going beyond the start-up phase and growing into large successful companies. We examine the long-term financing of these so-called scale-up companies, focusing on the United States, Europe, and Canada. The chapter first provides a conceptual framework for understanding the challenges of financing scale-ups. It emphasizes the need for investors with deep pockets, for smart money, for investor networks, and for patient money. It then shows some data about the various aspects of financing scale-ups in the United States, Europe, and Canada, showing how Europe and Canada are lagging behind the US relatively more at the scale-up than the start-up stage. Finally, the chapter raises the question of long-term public policies for supporting the creation of a better scale-up environment.

Presidential candidates and their campaigns in the United States are fully invested in the use of social media. Yet, since 1996 presidential campaigns have been experimenting with ways to use digital communication technologies on the Internet to their advantage. This book tells the stories of the practices of campaigning online between 1996 and 2016, looking at winners and also-rans. The stories provide rich details of the factors that contribute to the success or failure of candidates, including the influence of digital media. The stories also show how political campaigns over six election cycles transitioned from the paradigm of mass media campaigning, to networked campaigning, and finally to mass-targeted campaigning. Campaigns shifted from efforts at mass persuasion to networked persuasion by identifying and communicating with super-supporters to give them the right digital tools and messages to take to their social network. Campaigns learned over time how to use the Internet’s interactive affordances to communicate with the public in ways that structures what supporters do for the campaign that maximizes strategic benefit—what I call “controlled interactivity.” By the 2016 campaign, technology companies made it easier and more effective to engage in mass-targeted campaigning—using large-scale data analytics by campaigns and tech companies to identify target audiences for campaigns to advertise to online.

Democratic theory’s deliberative turn has hit a dead end. It is unable to find a good way to scale up its small-scale, formally organized deliberative mini-publics to include the entire community. Some turn to deliberative systems for a way out, but none have found a credible way to deliberatively involve the citizenry at large. Deliberation Naturalized offers an alternative way out—one we have been using all along. The key sites of democratic deliberation are everyday political conversations among people networked across the community. Informal networked deliberation is how all citizens deliberate together, directly or indirectly. That is how public opinion emerges in civil society. Networked deliberation satisfies the classic deliberative desiderata of inclusion, equality, and reciprocity reasonably well, albeit differently than standard mini-publics. Reconceptualizing democratic deliberation in this way highlights some real threats to the networked mode of deliberative democracy, such as polarization, message repetition, and pluralistic ignorance. Deliberation Naturalized assesses the extent of each of those threats and proposes ways of protecting real existing deliberative democracy against them. By focusing on the mechanisms underpinning every democratic deliberation among citizens, Deliberation Naturalized offers a truly novel approach to deliberative democracy.

This chapter discusses the rationale and methodology for applying techniques of active and passive neuromodulation for treatment-refractory post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Neuromodulation derives from the concept of neuroplasticity, which signifies long-term changes in the effectiveness of connections between distinct parts of the central nervous system. These changes are reflected across multiple levels of the nervous system, going from the cellular level to circuits and large-scale brain networks. It has been long suggested that altered neuroplasticity is a biomarker of neuropsychiatric diseases. With recent advances in neuroscience, research is emerging on evaluating the potential of modulating neural circuits by using innovative technologies, including noninvasive and invasive brain stimulation, EEG-neurofeedback, and fMRI neurofeedback.

When people are facing difficulties, they often feel the need for a confidant—a person to vent to or talk things through with who will offer sympathy or understanding. How do they decide on whom to rely? In theory, the answer seems obvious: if the matter is personal, they will turn to a spouse, a family member, or someone otherwise close. In practice, what people actually do often belies these expectations. This book follows a group of graduate students as they cope with the stress of their first year in their programs, probing how they choose confidants over the course of their everyday experiences and unraveling the implications of the process. The book then tests its explanations against data on national populations. It shows that rather than consistently rely on their “strong ties,” people often take pains to avoid close friends and family, because these are too fraught with complex expectations. People often confide in “weak ties,” as their fear that their trust could be misplaced is overcome by their need for one who understands. In fact, people may find themselves confiding in acquaintances and even strangers unexpectedly, without much reflection on the consequences. Amid a growing wave of big data and large-scale network analysis, the book returns to the basic questions of who we connect with, how, and why, and upends decades of conventional wisdom on how we should think about and analyze social networks.

The capacity to engage in spontaneous self-generated thought is fundamental to the human experience, yet surprisingly little is known regarding the neurocognitive mechanisms that support this complex ability. Dementia syndromes offer a unique opportunity to study how the breakdown of large-scale functional brain networks impacts spontaneous cognition. Indeed, many of the characteristic cognitive changes in dementia reflect the breakdown of foundational processes essential for discrete aspects of self-generated thought. This chapter discusses how disease-specific alterations in memory-based/construction and mentalizing processes likely disrupt specific aspects of spontaneous, self-generated thought. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive overview of the neurocognitive architecture of spontaneous cognition, paying specific attention to how this sophisticated endeavor is compromised in dementia.

This article focuses on how people lived in Asia Minor between about 5500 and 3000 BCE. It argues that the idea of a period dominated by small-scale, largely autarchic farming societies does not stand up to scrutiny. Although farming was of significant importance at many Chalcolithic societies in Asia Minor, the idea that wild food resources were no longer important is clearly mistaken. The Chalcolithic people were expanding their economies in multiple and often ingenious ways, and were increasingly partners in large exchange networks. Apart from farming, the exploitation of marine resources such as mollusks and fish has been documented. The rise of seafaring can be recognized through the distribution of Melos obsidian and the emergence of a cultural horizon in the northern Aegean that included western Asia Minor and the Aegean islands.

This chapter focuses on the wider cultural and psychological ramifications of chromaticism in film music. It is argued that pantriadicism strives for a specific affect: wonderment, and with it two subsidiary psychological states, frisson and awe. Both literary and cognitive/psychological accounts are given for this affect’s connection with harmony, with particular emphasis on the relationship of emotion and musical expectation. Frisson and awe have distinctive temporal profiles, leading to an evaluation of theoretical and empirical work on subjective temporality in connection with chromaticism. The analytical ramifications of this theory of chromatic temporality are examined with respect to a single large-scale case study, Howard Shore’s music for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the process, the author finds ways of integrating two traditionally separate analytical approaches: transformational networks and cognitive models of musical expectation.

This handbook provides an overview of research concepts, methodologies, approaches, and methods used regularly in the field of comparative and international education.As an interdisciplinary field, CIE does not espouse a singular or consistent research method. Instead, researchers generally utilize or are inspired by approaches from a wide range of disciplines, including economics, anthropology, sociology, political science, philosophy, and more. Given this diversity, this book helps readers understand the unique ways researchers employ method in comparative and international education. The handbook includes contributions from leading researchers based in Australia, Japan, Norway, Spain, the UK, the USA, etc., and each chapter includes a practical research example focused on a common topic throughout the book. It includes four sections covering core concepts, methodology, approaches, and methods and analysis, with chapters as diverse as autoethnography, Indigenous approaches, international large-scale assessments, and social network analysis, among others. The book is a partner volume to theBloomsbury Handbook of Theory in Comparative and International Education.

The emergence of village-communities profoundly transformed social organization in every part of the world where such societies developed. Contributors to The Archaeology of Villages in Eastern North America employ archaeological and historical evidence to explore the development of villages among eastern North American indigenous societies of the deep and recent past. Rich data sets from archaeology and contemporary social theory are employed to document the physical attributes of villages, the structural organization and aggregation of such entities, what it means to be a villager, cosmological and ritual systems, and how villages were entangled with one another in regional networks. The result is a volume which highlights the similarities and differences in the historical trajectories of village formation and development in eastern North America, as well as the larger processes by which villages have the power to affect large-scale social transformations.

Abstract Between Here and There is the first history of the creation of modern US-Mexico migration patterns narrated from multiple geographic and institutional sites. This book analyzes the interplay between the US and Mexican governments, civic organizations, and migrants on both sides of the border and offers a revisionist and comprehensive view of Mexican migration as it was established in the early twentieth century and reproduced throughout the century as a socioeconomic system that reached from Texas borderlands to western agricultural regions like California as well as to Midwestern farming and industrial areas. The book illustrates how large-scale migration became entrenched in the socioeconomic fabric of the United States and Mexico. Mexican migration operates through an interconnected transnational migrant economy made up of self-reinforcing local economic logics, information diffusion, and locally based transnational social networks. From central Mexico, the book expands across the United States and back to Mexico to show how the migrant economy spread and reacted to the political and economic crisis in the 1930s. In the 1930s, migrants fought for recognition in both societies. Those who returned to Mexico used an expansive vision to lay claim to citizenship and land there. Those who stayed in the United States joined efforts to lay claim to better pay, working conditions, and rights from the New Deal state, creating a base for later organizing. These dynamics shaped the establishment of the Bracero Program that brought in more than four million workers and has continued to frame large-scale Mexican migration until today.

Brains and computers were twins separated at birth. In 1943, it was known that action potentials were all or none, approximating TRUE or FALSE. In that year, Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch wrote a paper suggesting that neurons were computing logic functions and that networks of such neurons could compute any finite logic function. This was a bold and exciting large-scale theory of brain function. Around the same time, the first digital computer, the ENIAC, was being built. The McCulloch-Pitts work was well known to the scientists building ENIAC. The connection between them appeared explicitly in a report by John von Neumann on the successor to the ENIAC, the EDVAC. It soon became clear that biological brain computation was not based on logic functions. However, this idea was believed by many scientists for decades. A brilliant wrong theory can sometimes cause trouble.

This article examines the properties of protein-DNA conjugates and their potential for analytic applications. It begins with a discussion of DNA as a rigid construction tool for protein networks, reducing its functionality to the molecular equivalent of a steel bar in 'large-scale' architecture. It then describes DNA functionality in protein-DNA conjugates, like specific recognition of nucleotide sequences or its unique use as an amplification template. It also considers a range of applications for protein-DNA conjugates, including the use of artificial DNA-protein nanostructures as supramolecular building blocks and DNA-antibody conjugates for ultrasensitive antigen detection. Finally, it evaluates DNA-directed immobilization of protein-DNA adaptor molecules for flexible protein arrays. It shows that protein-DNA conjugates can be used as analytical targets for challenging and calibrating the properties of high-resolution atomic force microscopy, as well as analytical reagents for ultrasensitive target detection in immuno-PCR and related techniques.

This book investigates the dynamics of capital flight from Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa, countries that have witnessed large-scale illicit financial outflows in recent decades. Quantitative, qualitative, and institutional analysis for each country is used to examine the modus operandi of capital flight; that is, the “who,” “how,” and “where” dimensions of the phenomenon. “Who” refers to major domestic and foreign players; “how” refers to mechanisms of capital acquisition, transfer, and concealment; and “where” refers to the destinations of capital flight and the transactions involved. The evidence reveals a complex network of actors and enablers involved in orchestrating and facilitating capital flight and the accumulation of private wealth in offshore secrecy jurisdictions. This underscores the reality that capital flight is a global phenomenon, and that measures to curtail it are a shared responsibility for Africa and the global community. Addressing the problem of capital flight and related issues such as trade misinvoicing, money laundering, tax evasion and theft of public assets by political and economic elites will require national and global efforts with a high level of coordination.

Full of true stories more dramatic than any fiction, The Underground Railroad: A Reference Guide offers a fresh, revealing look at the efforts of hundreds of dedicated persons—white and black, men and women, from all walks of life—to help slave fugitives find freedom in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The Underground Railroad provides the richest portrayal yet of the first large scale act of interracial collaboration in the United States, mapping out the complex network of routes and safe stations that made escape from slavery in the American South possible. Kerry Walters' stirring account ranges from the earliest acts of slave resistance and the rise of the Abolitionist movement, to the establishment of clandestine "liberty lines" through the eastern and then-western regions of the Union and ultimately to Canada. Separating fact from legend, Walters draws extensively on first-person accounts of those who made the Railroad work, those who tried to stop it, and those who made the treacherous journey to freedom—including Eliza Harris and Josiah Henson, the real-life "Eliza" and "Uncle Tom" from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Small Spaces recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. It takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale. Taking the British empire in India as its primary focus, this book presents fourteen short, readable chapters to explore an array of overlooked places and spaces. From cook rooms and slave quarters to outhouses, go-downs, and medicine cupboards, each chapter reveals how and why these kinds of minor spaces are so important to understanding colonialism. With the focus of history so often on the large scale – global trade networks, vast regions, and architectures of power and domination – Small Spaces shows instead how we need to rethink this aura of magnitude so that our reading is not beholden such imperialist optics. With chapters which can be read separately as individual accounts of objects, spaces, and buildings, and introductions showing how this critical methodology can challenge the methods and theories of urban and architectural history, Small Spaces is a must-read for anyone wishing to decolonize disciplinary practices in the field of architectural, urban, and colonial history. Recasting the Architecture of the British Empire is an invitation to shift our attention to the small spaces that have long been considered insignificant because of their size or location, or the minor role they seemingly play in economic and political histories. Such spaces are discontinuous, never front and center. They are work spaces, storage spaces, cook rooms, and bottlekhanas—spaces with uncertain names and hazy genealogies. Spaces of privacy and privation, they tremor with unanticipated potential. Drawing on the archive of the British empire, Chattopadhyay offers a new approach to spaces such as the kitchen and verandah, and artifacts like the book shelf and a box of homeopathic medicine to demonstrate how attention to small scale and size, and the lived worlds of small spaces might help us rethink empire as a global enterprise.

In recent years, the wastewater treatment field has undergone an instrumentation revolution. Thanks to increased efficiency of communication networks and extreme reductions in data storage costs, wastewater plants have entered the era of big data. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools have enabled the extraction of valuable information from large-scale datasets. Despite this potential, the successful deployment of AI and automation depends on the quality of the data produced and the ability to analyze it usefully in large quantities. Metadata, including a quantification of the data quality, is often missing, so vast amounts of collected data quickly become useless. Ultimately, data-dependent decisions supported by machine learning and AI will not be possible without data readiness skills accounting for all the Vs of big data: volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. Metadata Collection and Organization in Wastewater Treatment and Wastewater Resource Recovery Systems provides recommendations to handle these challenges, and aims to clarify metadata concepts and provide advice on their practical implementation in water resource recovery facilities. This includes guidance on the best practices to collect, organize, and assess data and metadata, based on existing standards and state-of-the-art algorithmic tools. This Scientific and Technical Report offers a great starting point for improved data management and decision making, and will be of interest to a wide audience, including sensor technicians, operational staff, data management specialists, and plant managers. ISBN: 9781789061147 (Paperback) ISBN: 9781789061154 (eBook) ISBN: 9781789061161 (ePub)

Earthquakes are a huge global threat. In thirty-six countries, severe seismic risks threaten populations and their increasingly interdependent systems of transportation, communication, energy, and finance. This book provides an examination of how twelve communities in nine countries responded to destructive earthquakes between 1999 and 2015. And many of the book's lessons can also be applied to other large-scale risks. The book sets the global problem of seismic risk in the framework of complex adaptive systems to explore how the consequences of such events ripple across jurisdictions, communities, and organizations in complex societies, triggering unexpected alliances but also exposing social, economic, and legal gaps. It assesses how the networks of organizations involved in response and recovery adapted and acted collectively after the twelve earthquakes it examines. It describes how advances in information technology enabled some communities to anticipate seismic risk better and to manage response and recovery operations more effectively, decreasing losses. Finally, the book shows why investing substantively in global information infrastructure would create shared awareness of seismic risk and make post-disaster relief more effective and less expensive. The result is a landmark study of how to improve the way we prepare for and respond to earthquakes and other disasters in our ever-more-complex world.

The quality of data collected in official spatial databases is crucial in making strategic decisions as well as in the implementation of planning and design works. Awareness of the level of the quality of these data is also important for individual users of official spatial data. The author presents methods and models of description and evaluation of the quality of spatial data collected in public registers. Data describing the space in the highest degree of detail, which are collected in three databases: land and buildings registry (EGiB), geodetic registry of the land infrastructure network (GESUT) and in database of topographic objects (BDOT500) were analyzed. The results of the research concerned selected aspects of activities in terms of the spatial data quality. These activities include: the assessment of the accuracy of data collected in official spatial databases; determination of the uncertainty of the area of registry parcels, analysis of the risk of damage to the underground infrastructure network due to the quality of spatial data, construction of the quality model of data collected in official databases and visualization of the phenomenon of uncertainty in spatial data. The evaluation of the accuracy of data collected in official, large-scale spatial databases was based on a representative sample of data. The test sample was a set of deviations of coordinates with three variables dX, dY and Dl – deviations from the X and Y coordinates and the length of the point offset vector of the test sample in relation to its position recognized as a faultless. The compatibility of empirical data accuracy distributions with models (theoretical distributions of random variables) was investigated and also the accuracy of the spatial data has been assessed by means of the methods resistant to the outliers. In the process of determination of the accuracy of spatial data collected in public registers, the author’s solution was used – resistant method of the relative frequency. Weight functions, which modify (to varying degree) the sizes of the vectors Dl – the lengths of the points offset vector of the test sample in relation to their position recognized as a faultless were proposed. From the scope of the uncertainty of estimation of the area of registry parcels the impact of the errors of the geodetic network points was determined (points of reference and of the higher class networks) and the effect of the correlation between the coordinates of the same point on the accuracy of the determined plot area. The scope of the correction was determined (in EGiB database) of the plots area, calculated on the basis of re-measurements, performed using equivalent techniques (in terms of accuracy). The analysis of the risk of damage to the underground infrastructure network due to the low quality of spatial data is another research topic presented in the paper. Three main factors have been identified that influence the value of this risk: incompleteness of spatial data sets and insufficient accuracy of determination of the horizontal and vertical position of underground infrastructure. A method for estimation of the project risk has been developed (quantitative and qualitative) and the author’s risk estimation technique, based on the idea of fuzzy logic was proposed. Maps (2D and 3D) of the risk of damage to the underground infrastructure network were developed in the form of large-scale thematic maps, presenting the design risk in qualitative and quantitative form. The data quality model is a set of rules used to describe the quality of these data sets. The model that has been proposed defines a standardized approach for assessing and reporting the quality of EGiB, GESUT and BDOT500 spatial data bases. Quantitative and qualitative rules (automatic, office and field) of data sets control were defined. The minimum sample size and the number of eligible nonconformities in random samples were determined. The data quality elements were described using the following descriptors: range, measure, result, and type and unit of value. Data quality studies were performed according to the users needs. The values of impact weights were determined by the hierarchical analytical process method (AHP). The harmonization of conceptual models of EGiB, GESUT and BDOT500 databases with BDOT10k database was analysed too. It was found that the downloading and supplying of the information in BDOT10k creation and update processes from the analyzed registers are limited. An effective approach to providing spatial data sets users with information concerning data uncertainty are cartographic visualization techniques. Based on the author’s own experience and research works on the quality of official spatial database data examination, the set of methods for visualization of the uncertainty of data bases EGiB, GESUT and BDOT500 was defined. This set includes visualization techniques designed to present three types of uncertainty: location, attribute values and time. Uncertainty of the position was defined (for surface, line, and point objects) using several (three to five) visual variables. Uncertainty of attribute values and time uncertainty, describing (for example) completeness or timeliness of sets, are presented by means of three graphical variables. The research problems presented in the paper are of cognitive and application importance. They indicate on the possibility of effective evaluation of the quality of spatial data collected in public registers and may be an important element of the expert system.

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern literature and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and culture. Examining architectural and financial records, hotel trade journals, travel journalism, advertisements and cinematic and literary representations, it charts the rise of hotel culture from 1870 to 1939. The book defines corporate space as the new urban, capital-intensive, large-scale spaces brought about by corporations during the nineteenth century, including department stores, railway stations and banking halls. Only in hotels, however, did the individual live within corporate space: sleeping in its beds and lounging in its parlours. The hotel structured intimate encounters with the impersonal and the anonymous, representing a radically new mode of experience. In chapters featuring readings of both canonical and relatively little-studied texts by Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Bennett, and Henry Green, alongside films by F. W. Murnau, Segundo de Chomón, and Charlie Chaplin, Hotel Modernity considers the relationship between new kinds of spatial organisation and new forms of subjective and intersubjective life. Hotels provoked these writers and filmmakers to rethink the conventions and functions of fictional characters. This book charts the warping and decentring of the category of ‘character’ within the corporate, architectural, informatic and technological networks which come to define hotel space in this period.

As the development of autonomous vehicles proceeds full-speed ahead, it is often said that this new, disruptive form of transportation will change everything. Such a claim has drawn both philosophical and public attention to what could be called ethical emergencies: imaginary situations ranging from life-or-death trolley-problem conundrums to large-scale cyber-attacks on mobility networks. This perspective puts other important, but less dramatic, ethical dilemmas connected with driverless vehicles at risk of being underexplored or simply ignored. The primary focus of the original essays collected together in this volume shifts to considering these issues, ones arising out of more everyday human-autonomous vehicle relations and encounters. Topics investigated range from how driverless vehicles ethically affect what it is to be a pedestrian to how they could inspire more opportunities for social justice, along with a consideration of the need for policy makers to look at the softer impacts of driverless cars. Overall, this volume contributes to defining a new area of exploration connected to the ethics of driverless vehicles, one that should appeal not only to philosophers of technology but to engineering designers, regulators, and urban planners as well. Contributors: Jason Borenstein, Jeremy Carp, Shane Epting, Sven Ove Hansson, Joseph Herkert, Ike Kamphof, Robert Kirkman, Diane Michelfelder, Keith Miller, Sven Nyholm, Robert Rosenberger, Patrick Schmidt, Tsjalling Swierstra, and Galit Wellner

Before the seventeenth century, trade across Eurasia was mostly conducted in short segments along the Silk Route and Indian Ocean. Business was organized in family firms, merchant networks, and state-owned enterprises, and dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders. However, around 1600 the first two joint-stock corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, were established. This book tells the story of overland and maritime trade without Europeans, of European Cape Route trade without corporations, and of how new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations arose in Europe to control long-distance trade for more than three centuries. It shows that by 1700, the scene and methods for global trade had dramatically changed: Dutch and English merchants shepherded goods directly from China and India to northwestern Europe. To understand this transformation, the book compares the organizational forms used in four major regions: China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe. The English and Dutch were the last to leap into Eurasian trade, and they innovated in order to compete. They raised capital from passive investors through impersonal stock markets and their joint-stock corporations deployed more capital, ships, and agents to deliver goods from their origins to consumers. The book explores the history behind a cornerstone of the modern economy, and how this organizational revolution contributed to the formation of global trade and the creation of the business corporation as a key factor in Europe's economic rise.

Qiaopi is the name given to the “silver letters” Chinese emigrants sent home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These letters-cum-remittances, which were entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013, document the changing history of the Chinese diaspora in different parts of the world and in different periods, as well as its linkages to China. The qiaopi trade played a big part in making China transnational. This book, the first in English on qiaopi and on the origins, structure, and operations of the qiaopi trade, makes an important contribution to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration. It examines the culture, business, geography, and politics of the qiaopi phenomenon, both in China and abroad, as well as the special features of the qiaopi trade in each of its Chinese regions. It traces the history of the trade, including the shift from individual couriering to large-scale enterprise, and its role in China’s difficult transition from an agrarian bureaucracy under the Qing to capitalism and the start of modern statehood under the Kuomintang and then to collectivism and full statehood under the communists. The study argues that the qiaopi trade was indispensable to modern China’s economic and social modernization and the basis for one of China’s earliest excursions into the modern world. The changes that it wrought were built initially on primordial ties of locality, kinship, and dialect, and it later joined or created national, transnational, and international networks based on trade, finance, and general migration.

This book offers scholars and industry practitioners in the arenas of policy analysis, politics and media communications a method for astutely guiding large-scale policy and projects through the complex and changing landscape of a 24/7 news media. It is underpinned by empirical research that identifies and endeavors to close a considerable gap in current understanding and practice. This gap represents a failure to recognise and respect many powerful influences and associations that surround a policy arena that has drawn the ire of the news media. The result of this failure is ineffective communication that does little to advance the policy piece and, in the worst instances, leads to policy immobilization or poor policy decision-making. The author’s research spans a decade and two cities - Sydney, Australia and Montreal, Canada. The focus is on three metro-style rail infrastructure case study projects. One project is ongoing; one failed; and one is being upgraded, having recently reached fifty years of age. Through media, expert and public research this book builds an irrefutable case that the news media is highly influential to policy – and that these influences are complex, messy and changing. Drawing significantly on Actor-Network Theory, Richardson identifies the influential actors and alliances at play when policy is subjected to media discourse, and he proposes a framework for tracing and managing them. In doing so, he demonstrates that such a framework is not only vital for the successful negotiation of policy and projects in the media but also to an (r)evolutionary recasting of public, expert and media actors in the development and decision-making process.

Industrial clusters have existed since the early days of industrialization. Clusters exist because of the fact (or perception) that competing firms in the same industry derive some benefit from locating in proximity to each other. These benefits are external to the firm and accrue to similar firms in proximity. Examples include the cotton mills of Lancashire, automobile manufacturing in Detroit, and information technology firms in Silicon Valley. At the firm level, the presence of firms in the same industry, which are located in proximity (in the same region), are expected to increase internal productivity. At the industry level, it is possible to see quantifiable localized benefits of clustering which accrue to all firms in a given industry or in a set of interrelated industries. The sources of this productivity increase in regions where an industry is more spatially concentrated: knowledge spillovers, dense buyer–supplier networks, access to a specialized labor pool, and opportunities for efficient subcontracting. At the metropolitan area level, productivity increases from access to specialized financial and professional services, availability of a large labor pool with multiple specializations, inter-industry information transfers, and the availability of less costly general infrastructure. At the interregional scale, these gains are expected to lead to industry concentration in metropolitan and other leading urban regions. To obtain a complete picture of clustering, one must also consider its absence. If manufacturing and service clusters are associated with regional economic growth, the absence of productive clusters suggests the absence of growth and lagging regions.

Much writing about 19th-century East Africa has been distorted by the legacy of post-Enlightenment thought as well as by more insidious racist ideologies. Humanitarian lobbies throughout Western Europe, strongly influenced by positivist ideas, and campaigning to highlight the ravages of the slave trade, condemned Africa in their writings and propaganda to the periphery, outside universal history. Africa was reduced to a continent of slavery, in which the market, entrepreneurship and free wage labour could not exist. These ideas penetrated scholarly works and still survive in some guises. The consequence is that a variety of initiatives and forms of labour organization associated with the long distance trades in ivory and imported cloth have been overlooked by scholars, while the slave paradigm received widespread attention. Utilizing the conceptual tool of crew culture, Rockel documents a large-scale African migrant labour system. Nyamwezi caravan porters from the interior, as well as coastal Zanzibaris and Waungwana, forged a unique way of life in which market values and experience of wage labour and the caravan safari combined with customary standards and notions of honour derived from innovative reconceptualizations of tradition. The safari experience, commercial change, and interactions with peasant and pastoral communities along the trade routes, all contributed to the emergence of a unique East Africa modernity. This book can be read on a variety of levels It is a journey, a labour history, a story of African initiative and adaptation to modernity, and a contribution to a history of Tanzania and East Africa that gives due attention to intersocietal linkages, and networks. Rockel utilizes a variety of methodologies and theoretical approaches derived from neo-Marxist and postcolonial perspectives, as well as Africanist innovations in oral historiography and labour and gender studies. Drawing on such insights,Carriers of Culturedevelops and expands our understanding of the way workers invent new and unique cultures to make sense of and control the labour process, create support networks including collective leisure activities, maximize and protect economic interests, and manage the labour market. The book is clearly written, and is illustrated with late-19th-century photographs and artwork.

From the early 2000s, a new discourse emerged, in Africa and the international donor community, that higher education was important for development in Africa. Within this zeitgeist of converging interests, a range of agencies agreed that a different, collaborative approach to linking higher education to development was necessary. This led to the establishment of the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (Herana) to concentrate on research and advocacy about the possible role and contribution of universities to development in Africa. This book is the final publication to emerge from the Herana project. The project has also published more than 100 articles, chapters, reports, manuals and datasets, and many presentations have been delivered to share insights gained from the work done by Herana. Given its prolific dissemination, it seems reasonable to ask whether this fourth and final publication will offer the reader anything new. This book is certainly different from previous publications in several respects. First, it is the only book to include an analysis of eight African universities based on the full 15 years of empirical data collected by the project. Second, previous books and reports were published mid-project. This book has benefited from an extended gestation period allowing the authors and contributors to reflect on the project without the distractions associated with managing and participating in a large-scale project. For the first time, some of those who have been involved in Herana since its inception have had the opportunity to at least make an attempt to see part of the wood for the trees. Different does not necessarily mean new. An emphasis on the newness of the data and perspectives presented in this book is important because it shows that it is more than a historical record of a donor-funded project. Rather, each chapter in this book brings, to a lesser or greater extent, something new to our understanding of universities, research and development in Africa.