Affordable education. Transparent science. Accessible scholarship.
These ideals are slowly becoming a reality thanks to the open education, open science, and open access movements. Running separate—if parallel—courses, they all share a philosophy of equity, progress, and justice. This book shares the stories, motives, insights, and practical tips from global leaders in the open movement.Book Details
Scientists deserve public recognition. The ways that they are depicted, however, are severely limited in physical and personal traits, helping to establish and enhance stereotypes under the general title of ‘scientist’. These stereotypes range from the arrogant researcher who wants to rule the world, to the lab coat wearing ‘nerdy’ genius, but all generally fall to an extreme view of an existing perception of what a scientist should look and be like. For example, the popular image of ‘a scientist’ overlooks the presence of women almost entirely unless attributed to specific subjects and/or with narrow character depictions. The implications can be far-reaching. Young people, being heavily swayed by what they see and hear in the media, may avoid scientific careers because of these limited or unflattering portrayals of the scientific community, regardless of whether they reflect real life.
Based on findings from the Light’13 project, this book examines such stereotypes and questions whether it is possible to adjust people’s perception of scientists and to increase interest in science and scientific careers through a series of specific actions and events.Book Details
The concept of ‘cultural heritage’ has acquired increasing currency in culture, politics and societies in East Asia. However, in spite of a number of research projects in this field, our understanding of how the past and its material expressions have been perceived, conceptualised and experienced in this part of the world, and how these views affect contemporary local practices and notions of identity, particularly in a period of rapid economic development and increasing globalisation, is still very unclear. Preoccupation with cultural heritage - expressed in the rapid growth of national and private museums, the expansion of the antiquities’ market, revitalisation of local traditions, focus on ‘intangible cultural heritage’ and the development of cultural tourism - is something that directly or indirectly affects national policies and international relations. An investigation of how the concept of ‘cultural heritage’ has been and continues to be constructed in East Asia, drawing on several case studies taken from China, Japan and Korea, is thus timely and worthwhile.Book Details
The MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation) software project was started around 2006 with the goal of generating traffic and congestion patterns by following individual synthetic travelers through their daily or weekly activity programme. It has since then evolved from a collection of stand-alone C++ programs to an integrated Java-based framework which is publicly hosted, open-source available, automatically regression tested. It is currently used by about 40 groups throughout the world. This book takes stock of the current status.
The first part of the book gives an introduction to the most important concepts, with the intention of enabling a potential user to set up and run basic simulations.The second part of the book describes how the basic functionality can be extended, for example by adding schedule-based public transit, electric or autonomous cars, paratransit, or within-day replanning. For each extension, the text provides pointers to the additional documentation and to the code base. It is also discussed how people with appropriate Java programming skills can write their own extensions, and plug them into the MATSim core.
The project has started from the basic idea that traffic is a consequence of human behavior, and thus humans and their behavior should be the starting point of all modelling, and with the intuition that when simulations with 100 million particles are possible in computational physics, then behavior-oriented simulations with 10 million travelers should be possible in travel behavior research. The initial implementations thus combined concepts from computational physics and complex adaptive systems with concepts from travel behavior research. The third part of the book looks at theoretical concepts that are able to describe important aspects of the simulation system; for example, under certain conditions the code becomes a Monte Carlo engine sampling from a discrete choice model. Another important aspect is the interpretation of the MATSim score as utility in the microeconomic sense, opening up a connection to benefit cost analysis.
Finally, the book collects use cases as they have been undertaken with MATSim. All current users of MATSim were invited to submit their work, and many followed with sometimes crisp and short and sometimes longer contributions, always with pointers to additional references.
We hope that the book will become an invitation to explore, to build and to extend agent-based modeling of travel behavior from the stable and well tested core of MATSim documented here.Book Details
This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the value of the university armed service units – the University Officer Training Corps, University Royal Naval Units and University Air Squadrons. The units, many of which date back to the early 20th century, exist in order to provide students at UK universities with an experience of the British armed forces. Participation in the units is entirely voluntary, and there is no expectation that students will go on to join the armed forces on graduation, although a proportion of students each year do so.
The Value of the University Armed Service Units brings together the results of a research project which explored what the value of the units might be to student participants, to graduates in civilian jobs who had the experience as students, to the armed forces, to universities whose students take part in the units, and to employers of graduates with service unit experience. This book draws on quantitative and qualitative research data to explore whether, how, and why the units have value to these different groups.
Significant conclusions include the extent to which the units are able to assist students with the development of their transferable (graduate) skills; the potential significance of the units for future recruitment to the armed forces, particularly the Reserves; and the effect of unit experience in developing an informed understanding of the role and function of the British armed forces amongst the wider civilian population.Book Details
Why do we think differently from one another? Why do religious people adhere to their faith even against reason, whilst atheist thinkers label it "nonsense"? Why do some judges turn more to moral values and others less? Why do we attach different meanings to the same words? These questions can be tackled on psychological or sociological levels, but we can also analyze the subjects on the epistemological level. That is the purpose of this book, with Thoughts and Ways of Thinking offering Source Theory as a single explanation for epistemic processes and their religious, legal and linguistic derivatives. With this unified theory, old doubts are framed in new perspectives, and some of them even find their solution.
Prof. Benjamin Brown teaches Jewish thought and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has published numerous works on the Jewish religious tradition facing the modern era.