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How do cities shape the planet, and how can we shape cities for a sustainable future? This book explores how urbanization drives global environmental change and how cities function as dynamic ecosystems within the Earth system. Connecting urban ecology, Earth system science and socio-environmental thinking, it provides the knowledge and perspective to understand cities not just as challenges but as critical spaces for innovation and change. From air and water systems to energy flows, biodiversity, and climate impacts, it offers clear frameworks, real-world case studies, and tools for analyzing urban ecosystems and their impacts across scales. Written in accessible language, the book is for both physical and social scientists working in urban ecology, urban planning and sustainability. It will equip advanced students, researchers and professionals with the knowledge and tools to reimagine cities as critical hubs of resilience and sustainable innovation.
Volume I provides this generation's definitive account to crusading history, beginning with the First Crusade in 1095, through Richard the Lionheart, Saladin and the Third Crusade (1187–92), to the fall of the Holy Land in 1291. Across twenty-four chapters, leading experts also provide broad coverage of the source material, delivering fresh perspectives and interpretations. The volume brings together new insights into the establishment of crusader rule and the ongoing interaction of these new Christian territories – in military, religious, cultural and economic terms – with local societies and regimes, most notably the Muslims and the Byzantine Greeks.
The Viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Western Venezuela) was one of the largest global gold producers during the late colonial period. A distinctive commerce-oriented society emerged that diverged from the silver economies of Mexico and Peru. This study examines how the crossflow of precious metals fostered monetization, productive specialization, and financial complexity across New Granada societies. It interweaves a unique, broad set of quantitative sources to analyze the direction, magnitude, and dynamics of interregional flows of precious metals, domestic staples, and global goods. Combining Social Network Analysis and innovative sources, this is one of the first attempts to provide a quantitative assessment of monetary and commodity flows in any region of the former Spanish Empire.
In White Knuckling, Tess Wise combines political economy, political development, and ethnography to develop a theory of systemic racism as a political process. Using a Racialized Political Economy (RPE) lens, she links institutions, material conditions, culture, and contestation to demonstrate how systemic racism both benefits and harms white middle-class families. Drawing on interviews with families and bankruptcy court records, she follows individuals under economic strain and experiencing 'white knuckling' as they work through debt to explore how financialization turns hardship into revenue. She reveals that the promised rehabilitation often fails, operating as hidden public-private welfare that can preserve some assets while entrenching precarity. Tracing scripts of deservingness and responsibility, Wise demonstrates how racism in political economy helps and hurts white middle-class Americans, blinding them to their racial privilege and undermining the mechanisms that would lead to race and class solidarity.
This second volume of Seismic Imaging and Inversion supersedes the first with direct nonlinear inverse theory – where all the assumptions and shortcomings of the linear theory are removed. Chapters follow the processing sequence, including predicting the reference and scattered wavefields; de-ghosting; removing multiples; Q compensation; depth imaging; and direct non-linear inversion of target mechanical properties. Every step in the processing chain is achieved directly without knowing, estimating, or determining any subsurface information, including a velocity model. No other seismic concept or methodology has that capability. Taken together, the two volumes provide researchers and industry practitioners with a solid understanding of current mainstream methods as well as a new and more capable methodology that reduces to conventional methods when the prerequisites and assumptions within those are satisfied. This provides new options in the seismic toolbox that facilitate target identification across a broader set of seismic offshore and onshore plays.
This volume offers a sustained examination of ancient Greek philosophical accounts of truth. Thinkers from the Sophists and Presocratics to the Hellenistic schools gave substantial attention to the nature of truth, to what kinds of things are capable of being true, and to how truth may vary with perspective, context, or standards of assessment. A distinguished cast of world-leading scholars examine these diverse positions, showing how ancient philosophers grappled with questions that remain central today: whether truth is absolute or relative, how faultless disagreement is possible, and what it is for a statement to be correct relative to different parameters of assessment. The result is a rich historical and philosophical account showing the complexity of ideas about truth in Greek antiquity.
Ethnographers of socio-cultural phenomena routinely face moments in the field that evoke no answers for our interlocutors, or in which answers come in entirely different forms from those anthropologists and other scholars expect. The over-emphasis on structure and meaning in social science, and anthropology in particular, has inhibited the study of a-conceptual or 'darker' spaces of cultural phenomena. In this book, Diana Espírito Santo and Sergio González Varela explore areas of social life often neglected by traditional ethnographers, analytically described as spaces of negation, of not-knowing, where bodies, environments, and realities resist explanation or description, and where there are ultimately no answers – either for interlocutors or researchers. Examining fields as diverse as divination, parapsychology, monsterology, Brazilian capoeira, tattoo artistry, art and aesthetics, Afrofuturism, fantasy fiction, ufology, and Cuban Spiritism, they argue that radical uncertainty should propel novel forms of theory.
This is the first study of Sergei Eisenstein's relationship to classical antiquity. Eisenstein regarded the cinema as a Gesamtkunstwerk and considered the ancient Greeks among its ancestors. He detected what he called “cinematism” in Homer, the Laocoon sculpture group, the Acropolis, and elsewhere. The book interprets Eisenstein's chief concept, montage, as a visual analogy to clever juxtapositions in Roman poetry and examines his conflicts with Stalin and the Communist Party over Bezhin Meadow and Ivan the Terrible alongside the classical rhetorical strategy of formidable speaking in the face of absolute power and the Russian practice of Aesopian language. Eisenstein also influenced the design of the New Acropolis Museum via an essay about the Acropolis' architectural promenade and his epic Alexander Nevsky. The cinematism of the Parthenon Frieze, American cinema architecture modeled on the Parthenon, and Eisenstein's image of the cinema as a temple reinforce his importance within the classical tradition.
How should we talk about material objects, especially the virtual two-dimensional impressions of painting? A particularly sophisticated answer is provided by Philostratus' Imagines, one of the world's earliest and greatest works of art criticism. Jaś Elsner and Michael Squire situate this Imperial Greek text in its various 'Second Sophistic' contexts, especially in relation to Graeco-Roman traditions of image-making, aesthetics, rhetoric and the evocation of visual impressions (so-called 'ecphrasis'). They also champion its extraordinarily rich significance for anyone interested in perception, subjective imagination and the emotional leverage of art. If the Imagines remains unsurpassed as one of the western tradition's most creatively original, scintillating and self-reflexive works of art criticism, Elsner and Squire argue, its relevance is also pressingly contemporary: there are modern lessons to be learnt from this ancient project of educating the young – lessons that have a particular urgency in our own dawning digital age.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to equilibrium and non-equilibrium Green's function methods in many-body physics. It begins with a derivation of second quantisation for relativistic systems based on the many-body relativistic Dirac equation and its non-relativistic limit. The properties of equilibrium Green's functions are then described, with discussion of the two-time and Matsubara function methods. The coverage of non-equilibrium Green's function methods includes the diagrammatic techniques applicable to electrons and phonons using both the perturbation and variational approaches. Specific applications to steady-state and time-dependent quantum transport are presented in the final chapters. The book's accessible explanations, detailed derivations, and systematic treatment of the underlying theory make it a valuable resource for graduate students and early-career researchers. More than 200 problems have been included to support learning, with selected solutions available at the end of each chapter. Instructors benefit from access to the full solutions manual.
This ambitious history of industrial and cultural revolution illuminates the formation of a new idiom of energy and economy in nineteenth-century America. In 1851, Ralph Waldo Emerson made an arduous journey to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, in a series of lectures, he articulated modern ideas of industrial power, the soul's economy, and a value system premised on a new set of prime movers, fossil fuels. Emerson asked a practical question: 'How shall I live?' His response was to create a mythic language centered on the energy-and-economy dialectic. This book vividly shows how other authors, from Catharine Beecher, who laid the groundwork for the environmental canon, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who poeticized labor, to Henry Adams and Edith Wharton, as well as conservationists, homemakers, and coal miners, built on Emerson's 'practical question' to give fresh purpose to human existence in a radically altered world.
Global value chains (GVCs) are an important way in which modern businesses optimise their production processes by choosing to locate them in different countries. Given their importance to the world economy, it is no surprise that there is now a large literature in business. However, much less has been said about how insights from economics can be used in the analysis of GVCs. Reshaping Global Value Chains offers an in-depth and interdisciplinary analysis of global value chains, highlighting their crucial role in transforming global trade, production and development. It focuses on methods and toolkits closer to economics rather than other social sciences to explore key themes such as resilience, sustainability, innovation and inclusion, addressing the challenges posed by geopolitical, environmental and pandemic crises. Written by an impressive line-up of international scholars, this book provides practical and conceptual tools for understanding and rethinking GVCs in an era of increasing global uncertainty.
Kernel methods, with origins in the pioneering work of Mercer (1909), Bochner (1933), and Aronszajn (1950), have become central tools in modern mathematics and machine learning. This book explores their deep connections with approximation theory, highlighting both classical results and cutting-edge developments. Through clear explanations and illustrative examples, it guides readers from foundational concepts to contemporary applications, including computational methods and real-world problem solving. By bridging theory and practice, the text not only provides a rigorous understanding of kernels but also inspires further exploration and research. Suitable for students, researchers, and practitioners, it invites readers to engage with ongoing advances in this dynamic field and to contribute to its future growth.
How did the global circulation of modern technologies of warfare transform armed resistance? Focusing on the European territories of the Ottoman Empire, Ramazan Hakkı Öztan explores how revolutionary organizations navigated a world newly rich in material resources by the late nineteenth century. Unlike those who came before them, these revolutionaries operated in an increasingly connected global economy of violence that fed military-grade surplus weapons and newly invented explosives into their hands. Tracing commodity flows, Öztan profiles arms dealers, smugglers, and informers active in this economy of revolution. While revolutionaries tapped into transnational circuits, exchanged technical know-how, and engaged in calculated acts of violence, bureaucrats sought to dismantle black markets, gather counterintelligence, and wage their own campaigns of repression. Situating these connected histories across time and space, this global history explains the transformation of rebellion and imperial coercion by the turn of the twentieth century. This is a Flip it Open title and may be available open access on Cambridge Core.
This comprehensive and integrative guide to the evolution of human culture offers a unified introduction to one of today's most dynamic interdisciplinary fields. Drawing on research from the Stockholm School of Cultural Evolution, it explains how complex human cultures arise from simple learning mechanisms and social interactions. Across eleven accessible chapters, leading scholars trace the deep origins of culture in animal behavior, explore the evolution of language and technology, model the spread of ideas and norms, and examine how large-scale cultural systems emerge and transform. Bridging biology, psychology, archaeology, linguistics, intellectual history, and complex-systems science, this volume demonstrates how minimalist, domain-general principles can account for the extraordinary diversity of human cultures. Written for students and researchers across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences, it provides a coherent, up-to-date framework for understanding what culture is and how it changes.
As artificial intelligence chatbots offer increasingly sophisticated emotional support, society faces a profound question: can a machine truly empathize? Empathy and Artificial Intelligence provides the first comprehensive roadmap for this pivotal moment. Moving beyond simple binaries of 'hype' or 'doom,' this interdisciplinary volume unites leading psychologists, philosophers, and engineers to explore the tangled web of synthetic care. Key chapters investigate the 'AI Advantage' – where machines often outperform humans in perceived empathy – alongside the 'AI Penalty,' where discovering the artifice corrodes trust. The text navigates the distinct landscapes of text-based LLMs and embodied robots, addressing urgent ethical dilemmas and exploring whether reliance on AI risks the atrophy of our moral capacities or enables synthetic agents to scaffold stronger human relationships. Essential for researchers, students, and curious observers, this book investigates whether outsourcing our emotional labor saves us time, or costs us our humanity.
Laura Nenzi draws readers into a fascinating world of samurai, shipwrecks, nocturnal monsters and partying crowds, in this richly detailed, illustrated and evocative history of the night. The world over, the installation of public lights transformed the night, reshaping expressions of authority; altering centuries-old forms of production and consumption; and enabling the expansion of legitimate daytime activities into the night hours. The cities of Tokugawa Japan, however, lacked any kind of public illumination until the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Nenzi shows, many of the attributes associated with the modern night were firmly in place in cities and villages well before the age of streetlights. This exploration of the transformation of early modern Japan after dark challenges accepted definitions of modernity, encouraging readers to rethink the way we write history.
Why and how did English society embrace the prison as an answer to social problems? This study uncovers an important part of this story, revealing the growing centrality of prisons in early modern England to everyday social relations based on credit and debt. Between 1560 and 1700, prisons became essential to disciplining economic and moral life, provoking growing anxiety over incarceration and loss of liberty. In turn, new ideas crystallised about prisons as tools of coercion, deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation, while novel abolitionist politics developed among prison activists. This came to a head during the English Revolution, when prisoners' longstanding antagonism towards state and legal institutions entered radical milieus and law reform movements, impacting debates over authority, tyranny and liberty. This study reveals how straining credit networks, swelling prison populations and socioeconomic upheaval reshaped early modern society and politics. In doing so, Richard Thomas Bell sheds new light on the development of carceral ideas that remain fundamental, yet increasingly controversial, in contemporary society.
In recent decades, game theory has been extensively used in academic research throughout the social sciences, including international relations. The typical format of applied game theoretic journal articles is theorem-proof, but while the proof demonstrates that the theorem is true, it doesn't typically show how the researcher actually “discovered” the theorem. Ahmer Tarar's Game-Theoretic Models of International Crisis Bargaining explains how to derive the equilibria of (sometimes complicated) game-theoretic models. Examining central results on international crisis bargaining, using a unified modeling framework, he presents simplified versions of important published game-theoretic models in international conflict to demonstrate how to construct and solve game-theoretic models for academic research. He provides detailed derivations for each result, presenting a proposition summarizing the entire equilibrium strategy profile. With over 300 exercises, ranging from easy to difficult, Tarar provides readers with extensive practice for honing their skills and becoming skilled modelers.