Books published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG

This book is a rare collection of reflective and reflexive stories that reveal how seasoned academics, agents of grassroots social change, leaders and journalists transformed and shaped the development landscape in eastern and southern Africa. Whereas practical experiences are crucial assets and resources for shaping the academic environment and development practice landscape, most of the existing literature recommended as key learning materials in tertiary institutions is rarely in synch with the practical realities of development practice.The shared individual lived experiences from academic endeavours and fieldwork provide hands-on tools for students and emerging practitioners who might be involved in or are currently facilitating development work. The thrust of the book, therefore, is to demystify the day-to-day experiences of development practitioners while contributing to learning pathways or strategies for achieving viable solutions to the myriad of challenges, which grassroots communities face. The relevance of the book as a crucial resource for students pursuing development-oriented degree programmes in colleges and universities is obvious. Without any doubt, the compilation will be handy in the implementation of diverse development-oriented transformation agenda at academic, programming and policy levels.

This book outlines the current development of geoethical thinking, proposing to the general public reflections and categories useful for understanding the ethical, cultural, and societal dimensions of anthropogenic global changes.Geoethics identifies and orients responsible behaviors and actions in the management of natural processes, redefining the human interaction with the Earth system based on a critical, scientifically grounded, and pragmatic approach. Solid scientific knowledge and a philosophical reference framework are crucial to face the current ecological disruption. The scientific perspective must be structured to help different human contexts while respecting social and cultural diversity. It is impossible to respond to global problems with disconnected local actions, which cannot be proposed as standard and effective operational models. Geoethics tries to overcome this fragmentation, presenting Earth sciences as the foundation of responsible human action toward the planet. Geoethics is conceived as a rational and multidisciplinary language that can bind and concretely support the international community, engaged in resolving global environmental imbalances and complex challenges, which have no national, cultural, or religious boundaries that require shared governance. Geoethics is proposed as a new reading key to rethinking the Earth as a system of complex relationships, in which the human being is an integral part of natural interactions.

As the first book of a three-part series, this book is offered as a tribute to pioneers in vision, such as Béla Julesz, David Marr, King-Sun Fu, Ulf Grenander, and David Mumford. The authors hope to provide foundation and, perhaps more importantly, further inspiration for continued research in vision. This book covers David Marr's paradigm and various underlying statistical models for vision. The mathematical framework herein integrates three regimes of models (low-, mid-, and high-entropy regimes) and provides foundation for research in visual coding, recognition, and cognition. Concepts are first explained for understanding and then supported by findings in psychology and neuroscience, after which they are established by statistical models and associated learning and inference algorithms. A reader will gain a unified, cross-disciplinary view of research in vision and will accrue knowledge spanning from psychology to neuroscience to statistics.

This book provides an in-depth introduction to crisis management and leadership in SMEs, as well as methods, approaches and cases against the background of different crises; external ones in particular. Featuring contributions from research and practice, this book covers a plethora of SMEs from different sectors to match the diverse nature of small business practice. The combination of a sound theoretical framework for small firm crisis management along with practical instruments/methods and cases, help to improve the organizational resilience of SMEs. The authors also guide the reader to resources beyond the book, including an online ¿Crisis Toolkit¿ comprised of material such as further publications, crisis management blueprints, guidelines, checklists, and company cases on crisis management-related issues.

This international and multidisciplinary volume focuses on the male body and constructions of gender in a variety of cultural productions and formats. Locating the subject matter in relevant theoretical fields, it looks at representations of male bodies in various contexts through paranoid and reparative lenses. Organized into four major sections, the contributions assembled in this book feature engaging readings of ¿non/conforming bodies¿, ¿fashionable bodies¿, ¿passing bodies¿, and ¿pioneering bodies¿ that to different degrees foreground their critical and creative potentials. In its full scope, the book acknowledges the plurality of gendered experiences and the diversity of male bodies. The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter adds to Cultural Studies scholarship interested in the body and gender in general and contributes to the fields of Masculinity and Body Studies in particular.

This book introduces the fundamentals of biobanking and guides through the practical planning thereof, with a special focus on the situation in low- and middle-income countries. On the example of the setup of a Ukrainian biobank the book discusses the main steps and aspects of successful biorepository implementation and management. Topics covered include collection, storage and shipping of samples, establishment of an IT system, development of a sustainability plan, and project and risk management. Furthermore, the importance of the formation of international biobanking societies such as the Ukraine Association of Biobanks is highlighted, and their main objectives and tasks are discussed.The book addresses life science and business professionals as well as national authorities who are interested in biobanking in general and in setting up a biobank in particular.

The human brainstem has long been a neglected area in clinical medicine. This is shown by the fact that there is no introductory book on the neuroanatomy and pathology of this region.This book is intended to introduce the reader to the neuroanatomy of the human brainstem and combines an atlas with detailed information on the individual structures. The atlas features a state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging series, histological specimens (Darrow Red and Campbell staining) and a plastinate-based topographical part, which allows direct comparison of histological and topographical findings with neuroimaging. In addition, the reader is guided along the brainstem neuromer model through the human brainstem and learns about the functional properties of the individual structures of the brainstem. Where appropriate, peripheral targets of brainstem structures are illustrated and explained. Furthermore, each chapter covers the most important neurological disorders affecting the brainstem.This book aims to demonstrate that sound anatomical knowledge is required to understand brainstem pathology. It will particularly help those new to the field to better understand the complex anatomy of the human brainstem and will be useful to basic and clinical neuroscientists alike.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the IFIP TC 3 Open Conference on Computers in Education, OCCE 2021, held in Tampere, Finland, in August 2021. The 22 full papers and 2 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The papers discuss key emerging topics and evolving practices in the area of educational computing research. They are organized in the following topical sections: Digital education across educational institutions; National policies and plans for digital competence; Learning with digital technologies; and Management issues.

Wearable Systems Based Gait Monitoring and Analysis provides a thorough overview of wearable gait monitoring techniques and their use in health analysis. The text starts with an examination of the relationship between the human body¿s physical condition and gait, and then introduces and explains nine mainstream sensing mechanisms, including piezoresistive, resistive, capacitive, piezoelectric, inductive, optical, air pressure, EMG and IMU-based architectures. Gait sensor design considerations in terms of geometry and deployment are also introduced. Diverse processing algorithms for manipulating sensors outputs to transform raw data to understandable gait features are discussed. Furthermore, gait analysis-based health monitoring demonstrations are given at the end of this book, including both medical and occupational applications. The book will enable students of biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, signal processing, and ergonomics and practitioners to understand the medical and occupational applications of engineering-based gait analysis and falling injury prevention methods.

This study guide is designed for students taking courses in feedback control systems analysis and design. The textbook includes examples, questions, and exercises that will help electrical engineering students to review and sharpen their knowledge of the subject and enhance their performance in the classroom. Offering detailed solutions, multiple methods for solving problems, and clear explanations of concepts, this hands-on guide will improve student¿s problem-solving skills and basic and advanced understanding of the topics covered in these courses.

This book guides human resource managers and professionals on how to manage organizations and its employees through bankruptcy and organizational change. While many books on bankruptcy are written from the perspective of bankruptcy attorneys and bankers, this book focuses on the employee communication and organizational aspects of bankruptcy from an HR and C-Suite perspective. It provides a deep understanding of the impact of bankruptcy on organizations and how to manage communication and employee engagement during this transition. The book also provides valuable and practical checklists and templates for employee communiqués, frequently asked questions, and preparing court-ordered information.

There is no doubt that the proliferation of entrepreneurial activity is a current trend. Start-ups enable an effective transformation of knowledge, generating high added value to society. The objective of this book is to address the financing of the entrepreneurial process as a necessary element to articulate a solid business fabric, based on taking advantage of new opportunities. The book is structured in two parts. The first part takes as a reference the lack of financing in the entrepreneurship process and analyses different sources of financing available to entrepreneurs depending on the phase in which the project is located. The second part of the book analyses innovation and its links to the financing of start-ups, addressing the impact of emerging technologies and fintech services and the support of artificial intelligence. Finally, the book concludes with an examination of decentralized finance (DeFi), as an idea that is changing the financial world, giving rise to new financial paradigms.

This edited volume highlights cascading effects of the pandemic and lockdown on informal economies of varied countries in the Global South. Uneven development after colonization, imperialism, and externally influenced conflict have caused many countries in the formally colonized or semi-occupied countries in the world to lag behind in wealth accumulation, investments in manufacturing, and technology. The fact that these countries were dragged into world market dynamics on an equal footing with already developed countries exacerbated these inequalities and saw the rapid burgeoning of informal economies. COVID-19 and the lockdown of western countries unravelled global production chains, resulting in hordes of workers in the Global South losing their livelihoods. Even people engaged in traditionally locally-bound economic activities, such as domestic work and sex work, found their livelihoods disappear. This volume brings together case studies from India, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to analyze global economic disruptions as they affected informal sector workers who were already largely invisible within state development policies. The chapters question whether existing models of neoliberal development are still conducive within the post-pandemic Global South as it grapples with rebuilding economies, livelihoods, institutions, and systems of governance.