Books published by Springer Nature Singapore

In light of the potential novel applications of neurotechnologies in psychiatry and the current debate on moral bioenhancement, this book outlines the reasons why more conceptual work is needed to inform the scientific and medical community, and society at large, about the implications of moral bioenhancement before a possible, highly hypothetical at this point, broad acceptance, and potential implementation in areas such as psychiatry (e.g., treatment of psychopathy), or as a measure to prevent crime in society. The author does not negate the possibility of altering or manipulating moral behavior through technological means. Rather he argues that the scope of interventions is limited because the various options available to ¿enhance morality¿ improve, or simply manipulate, some elements of moral behavior and not the moral agent per se in the various elements constitutive of moral agency. The concept of Identity Integrity is suggested as a potential framework for a responsible use of neurotechnologies in psychiatry to avoid human beings becoming orderers and orderables of technological manipulations.

This book discusses the evolution of Mongolian shamanism from the distant past to the collapse of great empires such as the Yuan Dynasty in the fourteenth century, drawing on archeological findings and historical resources like the Mongolian Secret History. Further, it introduces readers to the cultural and ideological differences between Mongolian shamanists, who believe in the Eternal Blue Sky, and modern Mongols, who follow Buddhist teachings. In closing, the authors put forward the idea that Mongolian shamanism could have helped build great empires, emphasizing, e.g., shamanism¿s influence on Mongolian culture and literature in the Middle Ages.

This book covers all the advances in the imaging and elaborates on their applications and advantages. It provides step by step overview of the various advanced imaging modalities like molecular imaging, nano imaging, robotic imaging, stem cell imaging, optical imaging, immunoimaging, etc. It describes the applications of various advanced imaging modalities in pathologies like oncology, infection and inflammation and other conditions and provides the available therapeutic options with the help of these modalities. It also covers the detailed aspects of various modalities like ultrasound, CT, MRI, PET-CT, PET-MRI and other modalities. It includes the detailed explanation of various radiotracers, biomarkers and probes with many applications. Chapters cover detailed information at molecular level. The book is helpful for oncologists, hematologists, surgeons and many other specialists. 

This book is a work that focuses on the forest environmental tax. Forest resources have played a major role in preventing global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide and supplying oxygen. However, global economic growth has adversely affected the global environment and has exacerbated global warming due to excessive consumption of forest resources. The functions or ¿services¿ of forests are diverse, but the interest of the citizenry in forest cultivation is scarce since forests are public goods. Concurrently, Japanese forestry, which has played an important role in forest conservation, is steadily declining, and it is no longer possible for private forest operators to maintain the forest environment. Therefore, in order to realize sustainable economic growth, it is necessary to formulate policies for the conservation of appropriate forest environments. Forest conservation is an especially important policy issue for Japan, where two-thirds of the country is forested. InJapan, a forest environmental tax is being introduced as a forest conservation policy. As of 2021, the forest environmental tax has already been introduced in about two-thirds of the prefectures and soon will be introduced as a national tax. In this book, the significance and issues of the forest environmental tax will be sorted out, and the status of the introduction of the forest environmental tax in Japan will be compared with that of other countries. In addition, there is additional material regarding the water source conservation fund in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, a system similar to the forest environmental tax.

This book discusses the basic and cutting-edge theories in the area of energy diplomacy in the global context, focusing on topics such as international dialogues on energy, government-directed partnerships, international energy games, the activities of international agencies, and public energy diplomacy. It also analyzes in detail the relationship between global energy diplomacy and international energy, while at the same time identifying the major problems of Chinäs energy diplomacy to provide a framework for the country¿s energy diplomacy strategy¿an essential component of Chinäs overall diplomatic strategy.

This book presents the proceedings of the International Science and Technology Conference ¿FarEastCon 2021,¿ which took place on October 5¿8, 2021, in Vladivostok, Russian Federation. The book discusses modern achievements and promising research in the sphere of intelligent technologies in solving real, applied problems in various fields of industry and economic policies of different countries. Featuring selected papers from the conference, this book is of interest to experts in various fields whose work involves developing innovative solutions and increasing the efficiency of economic activities.

Biologics have revolutionized the treatment of autoimmune diseases due to their efficacy, speed of onset, and tolerability. The development of new agents and expanded use of existing agents continues to be a highly active area of investigation among rheumatic diseases, with a multitude of innovative therapeutic strategies in various stages of development. Although the story of treatments continues rapidly, therapeutic research in some conditions is hindered by the rarity of the disease, variation in phenotype, and concerns about toxicity. This fast-paced development of therapeutics,necessitates immediate evaluation  of individual biologic  agents and their best use in the new treatment regimens.This book provides an inclusive approach with the existing evidence concerning effectiveness and implications on the usage of biologics in treating various rheumatologic disorders. It also covers the evidence behind the rational use of these agents in varied autoimmune diseases. This manual also offers a complete overview of the existing & futuristic biologic treatments, and draws recommendations on how to standardize the most suitable regimen for a specific patient in the context of current guidelines. The handbook of Biologics in Rheumatology serves as a present and concise compendium to the modern therapeutic developments in the field.This book is likely to benefit  clinicians, residents, fellow and other healthcare workers dealing with rheumatological disorders, and also hard-core Rheumatologists, who are looking for a quick recap of Biologics of their interest.

This book introduces a multidimensional system that evaluates quality of life in China by pursuing a quantitative and analytical approach. A host of factors, including economic conditions and individual wellbeing, can affect people¿s satisfaction with their lives. In addition to GDP-associated indicators, sociological and environmental factors are also relevant when it comes to evaluating quality of life. Providing a general framework, while also considering gender, education and geographical differences in assessing quality of life, the book offers policy suggestions for improving both individual quality of life and the health of society as a whole.

This book explores how social discrimination in South Asia contributes to health disparities and impedes well-being. Specifically, it addresses how marginalization shapes health outcomes, both under normal circumstances and specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coming from diverse backgrounds and representing different academic disciplines, the authors have contributed a range of chapters drawing from quantitative and ethnographic material across South Asia. Chapters address reservation politics, tribal lifeways, Dalit exclusions from governmental institutions, Muslim ghettoization, gendered domestic violence, social determinants of health among migrant workers, and the pandemic fallout across South Asian society, among other subjects. Scholars draw on decades of experience and firsthand ethnographic fieldwork among affected communities. The chapters provide an innovative analysis, often in real time, of the human toll of casteism, classism, patriarchy, and religious intolerance¿many set against the spectre of COVID-19. Many authors not only present social critiques but also offer specific policy recommendations. The book is of great interest to social scientists, public health practitioners, and policy advocates interested in addressing systemic inequalities and ensuring that future pandemics are not disproportionately felt by the most vulnerable.

The book integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India's changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized in specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India's strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India's connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author's unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.

This book aims to propose a unique analytical framework to find out the general successful experience for large developing countries, which are defined with two main physical characters of large population and vast land. They are naturally crucial for the global development. Thirteen countries are chosen as large developing countries in this book, which are China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Congo (DRC). On the basis of selecting massive data, the author analyzes the performance of large countries in terms of human resources, natural resources, market size and other factors. The book conducts the comparative study of large countries¿ latecomer strength, transformation path and innovation strategy with the perspective of development economics. It presents a comprehensive overview about large developing countries

This book highlights recent advancements in such an important topic, through contribution from experts demonstrating different applications in ¿day-to-day¿ life, both existing and newly emerging biological technologies, and thought provoking approaches from different parts of the world, potential future prospects associated with some frontier development in non-conventional energy sources. It covers different aspects of cellulosic and lignocellulosic biomass; Cellulosics Biorefinery; Algal Biofuels; Biodiesel; Bioethanol; Microbial Fuel Cells; Biofuel cells; and biohydrogen production. This book is a comprehensive and informative compilation for international readers, especially undergraduate, post graduate students and researchers.

Multinational enterprises have become a main engine of the global economy, technical advancement, and product innovation, playing a pivotal role in the world economy and the global technological revolution. However, MNEs are also often embroiled in financial fraud and corporate scandal which show that MNEs should improve their corporate governance. Meanwhile, as COVID- 19 runs rampant across the world, populism and deglobalisation have resurged, and protectionism and unilateralism are exerting negative impacts on the world economy. Achieving sustainable development in this context is a test of a company's management and governance abilities. How should they be governed? This book will be a useful tool for university research-led teaching and fundamental research in corporate governance theories of MNEs in general, as well as using Chinese case studies as evidence to support our theoretical arguments.

This book offers a broad and holistic overview of issues in the Arctic today, a region which is transforming due to changing world order and climate agenda. While new economic opportunities - and with China, as well as other geopolitical players in the region - are emerging, new security challenges are arising as well. In this comprehensive scholarly resource, contributors from around the world and from a broad variety of disciplines share their thoughts on the future of the Arctic, in a manuscript that will be of interest to researchers, economists, and policymakers.

This book covers selected high-quality research papers presented in the International Conference on Cyber Security, Privacy and Networking (ICSPN 2021), organized during 17-19 September 2021 in India in Online mode. The objectives of ICSPN 2021 is to provide a premier international platform for deliberations on strategies, recent trends, innovative approaches, discussions and presentations on the most recent cyber security, privacy and networking challenges and developments from the perspective of providing security awareness and its best practices for the real world. Moreover, the motivation to organize this conference is to promote research by sharing innovative ideas among all levels of the scientific community, and to provide opportunities to develop creative solutions to various security, privacy and networking problems.

The book is a meticulous work in answering these questions which often occur to foreigners as well as modern Chinese themselves at the thought of the old China and its experience in modern times: What is Chinese civilization? How could it exist for several millennia and spread that far? Is there anything inherent in this civilization?From the standpoint of an ¿outsider¿ to this civilization, the author incorporates various elements, such as geographic factors, language, thoughts, with the recurrent themes along the two thousand years and changes throughout, rather than simply following a lineal progression. His historiographical approach, the methodology of eclectic common sense, as he termed it, is a new try in this field and will present a brand new perspective for both readers and researchers in that field.

The book introduces the reader to western ethics as a subject, along with its three standard subdivisions. Although the book is written with university students, policymakers, and professionals in mind, the book is lucid enough to be accessible to most adult readers. The book begins with introductions to the basics of ethics. These chapters are meant to provide the reader with the background knowledge necessary for understanding the more technical chapters on metaethics, normative ethics theories, and applied ethics, the three well-known subdivisions within ethics. The chapters that follow take up core ethical issues from each of these areas. The sections focus on explanation and a critical understanding of the ethical issue. The chapters also have examples, cases, and exercises to encourage critical thinking and to enable the reader to grasp the issue better. The book has tried to bring contemporary issues, such as ethics of human organ transplantation, and contemporary theories, such as Amartya Sen¿s concept of Justice and Martha Nussbaum¿s Capabilities Approach, to engage the readers with ethics in the real world. The book concludes with applied ethics, but with the example of ethics of artificial intelligence. The aim is to keep ethics as a future-driven activity and to emphasize the need to understand the real-world ethical situations and dilemmas that will affect the stakeholders all around the world in the coming years as artificial intelligence and data-driven technologies change our everyday life.

This book provides an overview of the sources, occurrence, fate and solution of microplastics. Microplastics in sediment and soil environment have been only scarcely surveyed, and no profound discussion on microplastics removal is summarized until this book. Here we focus on sharing clear schematic information and the book sufficiently supports important microplastic topics: such as microbial network, microplastic toxicology and accumulation, agricultural plastics, nylon microplastics, polystyrene microplastics, polyethylene microplastics and many more. The book mainly provides an overview of recent advances in knowledge of sources, occurrence, distribution, chemical behavior and ecological threats while it also presents information related to feasible solutions for microplastic pollution management. This comprehensive resource will be valuable up-to-date knowledge for environmental scientists, ecotoxicologists, ecologists, marine biologists, environmental chemists in the academic field and this book is intended to be beneficial information for environmental managers, water suppliers, wastewater treatment, plastics manufacturer, and policy makers as well.

This book gathers selected research papers presented at the Second Asian Symposium on Cellular Automata Technology (ASCAT 2023), organized by academicians from Kolkata at Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, West Bengal, India, and by researchers of Cellular Automata India, a research group which was created during the pandemic, during March 2¿4, 2023. The book presents one of the most emergent areas in natural computing, cellular automaton (CA). CA is a paradigm of uniform fine-grained parallel computation which has been explored to understand complex systems by developing its model at the microscopic level. The book discusses many real-life problems in the domain of pattern recognition and classification, clustering, electronic circuit design, bioinformatics, material and mining engineering, modelling of physical and social systems, etc., by using CA.

This book provides a general treatment of a class of functionals modelled on convolution energies with kernel having finite p-moments. A general asymptotic analysis of such non-local functionals is performed, via Gamma-convergence, in order to show that the limit may be a local functional representable as an integral. Energies of this form are encountered in many different contexts and the interest in building up a general theory is also motivated by the multiple interests in applications (e.g. peridynamics theory, population dynamics phenomena and data science). The results obtained are applied to periodic and stochastic homogenization, perforated domains, gradient flows, and point-clouds models.This book is mainly intended for mathematical analysts and applied mathematicians who are also interested in exploring further applications of the theory to pass from a non-local to a local description, both in static problems and in dynamic problems.

This book explores the intelligent autonomous control problems for spacecraft with multiple constraints, such as pointing/path constraints, linear/angular velocity constraints, performance constraints, etc. It provides an almost self-contained presentation of dynamics modeling, controller design and analysis, as well as simulation studies. The book aims to offer a valuable guide for researchers and aerospace engineers to address the theoretical and technical difficulties in different applications, ranging from spacecraft attitude reorientation and tracking to spacecraft proximity operations, and is mainly intended for technical and engineering staff engaged in spacecraft dyanmics and control areas.

This book focuses on the creation and demonstration of a carbon¿carbon (C¿C) single bond beyond 1.8 Å and on elucidation of its unique nature. C¿C single bond is one of the most fundamental concepts in organic chemistry. The elucidation of its nature is important for further understanding chemical phenomena. The nature in the extreme state of C¿C single bond is still unexplored because of the instability of compounds. In terms of its bond length, the limit had been predicted around 1.8 Å based on the experimental and theoretical studies. This book describes a first example of a C¿C single bond beyond 1.8 Å by employing the original intramolecular core-shell strategy to make a weak and elongated bond stable enough. The presence of such an elongated bond was demonstrated by experimental and theoretical studies. The bond length changes could affect physical properties such as optical absorption and redox potential. Furthermore, its unique "flexibility" was discovered. This book benefits the chemists with deeper understanding of the covalent bonding.

This book illuminates the importance of the citizen charter (CC) in local service delivery in Bangladesh. It describes how CC was implemented into the service delivery process and its impact. In the 1970s, the transition from traditional public administration to new public management was inspired by globalization, the emergence of an information and technological society, and many economic theories, such as public choice, principal-agent theory, and transaction cost. The purpose of the government in a welfare state is to serve the citizens by providing essential services. However, public service delivery in most developing nations is ineffective owing to corruption, waste of public funds, a lack of responsibility on the part of public employees, etc. In this context, CC emerged as a means of educating individuals on many elements of services, so they may hold service providers accountable. Thus, the issue of framing and implementation of CC has been put in place due to the persistent pressing of academicians, politicians, and practitioners advocating for better local service delivery.

The book explores largely overlooked areas of Silk Road studies by searching for multidisciplinary evidence on the connotations of Silk Road culture and by rewriting social complexities along the Silk Road in different historical periods. It investigates the impacts of conflicts and communication between Silk Road civilizations, presents the latest archaeological discoveries and research findings in the field of Silk Road studies, and develops a new Silk Road archaeological system. By doing so, it defines a new direction for Silk Road archaeological studies.

This book is about the design and control of biomimetic underwater robots. It explains the six aspects of the underwater biomimetic vehicle- manipulator system in detail and provides practical examples. This book is the authors¿ long-term exploration of the theoretical and technical issues in the development of the underwater biomimetic vehicle-manipulator system and is written based on more than 15 years of scientific research and practical experience. This book is a helpful reference for the researchers, engineers, master and Ph.D. students in the field of biomimetic underwater robots.