Books published by Springer International Publishing

This book develops an understanding of researchers' engagements with their subjects as a generative mode of knowledge production that takes place between researchers and their research fields. It promotes the idea that rather than value neutrality, caring may be helpful when a researcher makes suggestions for improvement and constructs interventions. The authors reflect on questions such as how researchers take can sides without taking a fundamental principle of action for granted. What tensions and obstacles do researchers meet while they strive to engage carefully? How do careful engagements affect academic work and output? What inequalities are produced especially when there is funding involved in the research? The contributions discuss a range of topics including responsibility (and response-ability), collaboration, proximity, ethics, bodily entanglements, values, and affective attachments in social research. The book brings together an impressive team of international researchers from different disciplines to nuance the discussion and provides a rich collection of empirical studies from healthcare, urban planning, environmental science, participatory design, and museums, among others. This is a very topical volume for all social and behavioural scientists engaging in research, particularly those engaged in ethnographic research.

This volume explores the implications of student mobility on higher education across the Asia Pacific Region. Student Mobility has become a major feature of higher education throughout the world, and most particularly over the past two decades within the Asia Pacific Region. This system of mobility is entering a period of profound predicted change, created by the social and economic transformations being occasioned by the rapid increased uses of artificial intelligence (AI), a process that is being increasingly framed as the ¿Fourth Industrial Revolution¿ or Work 4.0, a process that is widely predicted to evoke fundamental changes in the ways that work is performed and who does it. This volume explores various dimensions of this process, examining various aspects of the process as they are affecting national and regional economies even as the phenomenon produces a wide variety of engagements with the global economy as a whole.

K+ channels regulate the passage of potassium ions across lipid membranes, influencing numerous biological functions, including homeostasis, sensory perception, and information transmission. This volume explores the widespread involvement of K+ channels in cellular processes, which makes these membrane proteins intriguing targets for both fundamental scientific inquiry and the development of pharmaceutical compounds. The chapters in this book provide an in-depth look at various techniques and the latest protocols commonly used in ion channel research to investigate K+ channel structures, functions, and their interactions with drugs. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Cutting-edge and thorough, Potassium Channels: Methods and Protocols is a valuable resource for any researcher who is interested in learning more about potassium channels. Chapters 5 and 7 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book combines chapters emphasising mathematical, statistical, and computational modelling applied to insect populations, particularly pests or natural enemies in agricultural landscapes. There is a gap between agricultural pest experimentation and ecological theory, which requires a connection to supply models with laboratory, and field estimates and projects receiving inputs and insights from models. In addition, decision-making in entomology with respect to pest management and biological conservation of natural enemies has been supported by results obtained from different computational and mathematical approaches. This book brings contemporary issues related to optimization in spatially structured landscapes, insect movement, stability analysis, game theory, machine learning, computer vision, Bayesian modelling, as well as other frameworks.

This edited collection addresses concepts of value and its impact on economies and economic decision-making in Mesoamerica. It brings together various theoretical and methodological approaches to illuminate the little-studied topic of value in ancient economies.While scholars increasingly note that tangible objects found in the archaeological record could assume different values, depending on how they were used and circulated, less attention has been paid to how we might infer consensus (or lack of consensus) on how value was determined in past cultures so different from contemporary ones. These contributions show how multiple and conflicting understandings of what is important and meaningful coexist within any society even as moments of exchange create the impression of shared formulations of value. They consider divergences between shared understandings based on systems of beliefs and patterns of practice and the individual decisions of social actors. They also discuss howinequalities in social structures might inform our understanding of value, and how a multiplicity of values might encourage closer inspection of inequality in turn.The book brings together fifteen chapters focused on many parts of Mesoamerica, including Western Mexico, the Basin of Mexico, Veracruz, Oaxaca, and various parts of the Maya Lowlands, and range chronologically from the Classic period (250-900 CE) to the Spanish Conquest in the early 16th Century. It appeals to those working in archaeology, economic anthropology, economic history, and all those interested in how value can be understood in terms of contemporary cultural and political differences.

This book focuses on equity crowdfunding in order to shed light on female entrepreneurship. Global awareness of gender inequality has resulted in international efforts to alleviate disparities and promote women's growth. This book draws academics, policymakers, and practitioners' attention to equity crowdfunding as a good environment for female entrepreneurs to overcome gender gaps and establish a more inclusive and fair financial landscape. While women are often found to be at a disadvantage when compared to male counterparts in traditional credit markets, the book's our empirical evidence suggests that this is not the case for alternative funding channels such as crowdfunding. The book's distinguishing feature is its emphasis on the equity crowdfunding market, which could be viewed as the ideal environment for developing and growing female entrepreneurial skills. From this perspective, the book provides a clear recommendation to policymakers on how to support women in alternative finance, by providing more specific and detailed rules and action plans focusing on this topic.

This book focuses in detail on data science and data analysis and emphasizes the importance of data engineering and data management in the design of big data applications. The author uses patterns discovered in a collection of big data applications to provide design principles for hypothesis generation, integrating big data processing and management, machine learning and data mining techniques.The book proposes and explains innovative principles for interpreting hypotheses by integrating micro-explanations (those based on the explanation of analytical models and individual decisions within them) with macro-explanations (those based on applied processes and model generation). Practical case studies are used to demonstrate how hypothesis-generation and -interpretation technologies work. These are based on ¿social infrastructure¿ applications like in-bound tourism, disaster management, lunar and planetary exploration, and treatment of infectious diseases.The novel methods and technologies proposed in Hypothesis Generation and Interpretation are supported by the incorporation of historical perspectives on science and an emphasis on the origin and development of the ideas behind their design principles and patterns. Academic investigators and practitioners working on the further development and application of hypothesis generation and interpretation in big data computing, with backgrounds in data science and engineering, or the study of problem solving and scientific methods or who employ those ideas in fields like machine learning will find this book of considerable interest.

Climate Liberalism examines the potential and limitations of classical-liberal approaches to pollution control and climate change. Some successful environmental strategies, such as the use of catch-shares for fisheries, instream water rights, and tradable emission permits, draw heavily upon the classical liberal intellectual tradition and its emphasis on property rights and competitive markets. This intellectual tradition has been less helpful, to date, in the development or design of climate change policies. Climate Liberalism aims to help fill the gap in the academic literature examining the extent to which classical-liberal principles, including an emphasis on property rights, decentralized authority and dynamic markets, can inform the debate over climate-change policies. The contributors in this book approach the topic from a range of perspectives and represent multiple academic disciplines. Chapters consider the role of property rights and common-law legal systems in controlling pollution, the extent to which competitive markets backed by legal rules encourage risk minimization and adaptation, and how to identify the sorts of policy interventions that may help address climate change in ways that are consistent with liberal values.

This handbook offers a comprehensive presentation of the field of supply chain management. Divided into six sections, it addresses broad strategic issues, then focuses in on specific locations and technology issues along the supply chain.The chapters explore topics related to upstream supply chain management, organizational operations and management of supply chains, downstream supply chain management, transportation and logistics management, with strategic, technology, economic, and operational dimensions also covered. Further, the book includes cross-cutting concerns relating to issues such as sustainability, performance management, financial concerns, resilience, and inventory management.Each chapter presents background on the topics, examines the current concerns of interest to practitioners and researchers, identifies future directions of research, and addresses the managerial implications related to the topicWith chapters writtenin an accessible, easy-to-grasp style, this work will serve as a go-to reference for academics, students, and practitioners alike.